International Socialism #155 out now

The latest issue of International Socialism is out now, with analysis of the glorious general election of 2017 in Britain and also an interview with a French activist regarding 'the meaning of Macron'.  Other topics discussed include Podemos in Spain, the Russian Revolution at its centenary, and the state of the class struggle in Egypt and China - check out the full contents list anyway and consider subscribing if you do not currently... 

Tim Sanders on Charlie Hebdo

The point of satire is to attack the powerful, to expose their hypocrisy and absurdity, and of course to be funny. If satire is directed downwards it is not satire, it’s bullying.
British socialist cartoonist Tim Sanders on satire on the latest Socialist Review

No to Fascist Le Pen in Oxford

The Oxford Union have chosen to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in a particularly insulting fashion - inviting Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist Front National - whose father Jean-Marie Le Pen once described the Holocaust as 'a point of detail' in the history of the Second World War, to speak on 5 February - Oxford Unite Against Fascism are organising against Le Pen's visit - see here for more.

See also this Unite Against Fascism Public meeting:
After France: Unity - No to fascism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia - Defend civil liberties. 7-9pm Thursday 29 January, Committee Room 11, House of Commons (via main entrance for Parliament on Cromwell Green). Nearest tube: Westminster Speakers include Diane Abbott MP, Talha Ahmad Muslim Council of Britain, Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild, Maz Saleem Daughter of the late Mohammed Saleem, David Rosenburg, Sabby Dhalu & Weyman Bennett UAF.

France: The Republic of Islamophobia

The persistent targeting of Muslims is preventing the effective management of diversity in French society. It is exacerbating tensions and obscuring the fundamental social and economic problems besetting France. It is encouraging the growth of the Front National. The only way to escape this vicious circle is to target and isolate the very real threat posed by the FN. The principal obstacle to this remains Islamophobia, in all its guises.
Jim Wolfreys, 'The Republic of Islamophobia', Critical Muslim, 13.

Edited to add: Tariq Ali on Charlie Hebdo, see also this and this - two good responses to an unconvincing attempt to defend the publication from the charge of racism.

Resist the racist offensive against Muslims

As well as Hassan Mahamdallie on levels of Islamophobia before the horrific Paris attacks (in this month's Socialist Review), see this week's  Socialist Worker for the anti-racist arguments more necessary now than ever to challenge the rising racist backlash underway - while there is also some useful commentary on Charlie Hebdo itself here, here and for some essential historical background see Robert Fisk - while on a related point Jim House and Neil MacMaster's work, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory recovers some of hidden history of another Paris massacre - one which saw 200 Algerian protesters killed by the police in Paris.

How poppies and patriotism muffle the truth about the First World War

The only point which matters about the First World War and its sequels is that they must not be allowed to happen again. Honouring and worshipping those who died in them, praising them for their patriotic sacrifice and wearing poppies as symbols of their blood on the ground where they fell serves only to glamorise the atrocity and pave the way to the next one.
Paul Foot, Galmorising an atrocity, 1989.  

It does not matter now, a century after it started, how sad we are about those the first world war killed. Our soulfulness won’t bring back a single slaughtered soldier. What can make a difference is our historical understanding of the Great War, its causes and consequence. History is worth far more than the illusion of memory, when none of us today actually have a memory of being soldiers in 1914-18...

 Out of the millions who died, this installation is very specific about who it mourns. It does not include the French, who lost a tenth of their young men, or Russia, where the war precipitated revolution, civil war and famine. And of course it does not include a single German. Instead it is accumulating 888,246 ceramic poppies each of which – explains the Tower of London website – “represents a British military fatality during the war.”

If we can only picture the Great War as a British tragedy we have not learned very much about it. Yet some historians today glibly encourage that blinkered vision. It sells books. Popular history has been invaded by revisionists who tell us that far from being lions led by donkeys in a futile bloodbath, the British soldiers who fought from 1914-18 were fighting, as the propaganda at the time claimed, to defend democracy from militarist authoritarian Germany...In so explicitly recording only the British dead of world war one, this work of art in its tasteful way confirms the illusion that we are an island of heroes with no debt to anyone else, no fraternity for anyone else...

Jonathan Jones, History and all its grisly facts are worth more than the illusion of memory, 2014.

Euro-fascism - what it is and how to fight it

The latest issue of Socialist Review has among other things a good analysis of the Euro-elections, one very worrying feature of which was the rise of Euro-fascist parties such as the Front National in France, but also others such as the German neo-Nazi NPD, Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary amidst the continuing economic crisis.   After the last European elections in 2009, I raised the question of whether it was time to dust off the old slogan about whether it was the 1930s in slow motion.  Given classical fascism turned Europe into a dark continent within the living memory of many people, the fact that a fascist party got the majority of votes in the European elections in France while in Germany, a member of the neo-Nazi NPD was elected to the European parliament means the left cannot afford to be complacent about the danger posed here.  Given this, it is perhaps timely that Chris Bambery's 1993 article from International Socialism on Euro-fascism: the lessons of the past and current tasks is now available online at the Marxists Internet Archive. Though obviously twenty years old and written at a time when Euro-fascism was just emerging as a political current - and though the author's own politics have shifted - some would say degenerated - somewhat since writing this article in 1993, the piece still repays reading and provides a useful introductory historical overview of how the left and trade union movement tragically failed to stop classical fascist formations coming to power in the inter-war period through a combination of sectarianism, ultra-leftism, and liberalism - and why the method of the united front and mass activity against the Nazis as articulated by Leon Trotsky (and put into practice in formations such as the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s in Britain and its successor Unite Against Fascism today) - remains a critical weapon if the left across Europe are going to block their rise today.
 

On the Thomas Paine Trail in Thetford, Norfolk

Thomas Paine on the official sign of Thetford - not many places in Britain honour revolutionaries on their town signs. As an Ipswich Town fan, I rarely venture into Norfolk if I can help it, but recently I made an exception to visit Thetford (a town on the Norfolk-Suffolk border) to undertake the 'Thomas Paine Trail'. Thomas Paine - as readers of Histomat will recall - was one of the greatest revolutionaries during the age of bourgeois-democratic revolution from 1775-1848, was born in this little East Anglian town in 1737 (see this piece by Peter Linebaugh for more about Thetford's historic significance). I like to see Paine - who once gave a toast 'to the world revolution' - as one of the finest people to ever come out of East Anglia (rather than say, let him be claimed by Norfolk alone), but I am basically just happy that the good people of Thetford - as well as others - have honoured Paine over the years - as this post will hopefully go some way to show. Statue of Thomas Paine, erected in 1964 in Thetford town centre and designed by Sir Charles Wheeler. Words from Paine's The Rights of Man, on the front of the plinth - 'My country is the world, my religion is to do good'. Paine's statue has him holding The Rights of Man, though the book is upside down - apparently intentionally in order to get local people talking about Paine and the book. There is lots of writing around the plinth of the statue - mostly quotes from Paine's The Age of Reason. Sadly if perhaps inevitably, most of Paine's most radical stances for his time - against slavery and for women's liberation for example - are not recorded on the stature - and there was a distinct lack of really radical quotes - for example Paine's thoughts on the monarchy (eg. 'Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world, had it not been for the abuses it protects. It is the master-fraud, which shelters all others.' or perhaps this: 'Monarchy is a silly stupid thing. A play thing for the rich and a menace for the poor'. Quotes like this would really I think get the local people of Thetford talking... This avenue is not that far from the house where Thomas Paine was born... This nice little plaque marks the birthplace of Thomas Paine (the original home has long gone, so instead it can be found on the wall of what is now the Thomas Paine Hotel. This plaque - also on the side of the building that is now the Thomas Paine Hotel - was put into place in 1943. The inscription reads: "Journalist, Patriot and Champion of the common man. Thomas Paine, son of a humble Thetford staymaker, was born near this house. From his talented pen came the voice of democratic aspiration of the American Republic, though such splendid writings as 'Common Sense', 'Crisis' and 'The Age of Reason'. Buried in New York, this simple son of England lives on through the Ideals and Principles of the democratic world for which we fight today. In tribute to his memory and to the everlasting love of freedom embodied in his works, this Plaque is gratefully dedicated through the voluntary contributions of Soldiers of an American Airforce Group." The plaque was then placed here as a tribute from the American aircrew of a B17 named "Thomas Paine", based at nearby Knettishall during the Second World War. The aircraft bore the legend ”Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered”, - a quote from the first of Paine’s American Crisis papers, which maintained American morale during the War of Independence. The aforementioned Thomas Paine Hotel in White Hart Street - start of the official 'Thomas Paine trail' (though disappointingly the pub hardly advertises this fact). The Ancient House Museum - just a little bit down White Hart Street - is a decent little museum and an essential place to visit on the 'Thomas Paine trail' - with a room dedicated to Paine, where you can watch a little introductory film about his life, see a few artefacts (including his 'deathmask') and buy a nice little postcard with a portrait of Paine. Paine died in 1809 - twenty years after his death in 1829 an iron bridge was built in Thetford - this is only relevant because Paine himself liked iron bridges and was a designer of them. But it is a nice old bridge. Thetford Grammar School (still in existence) - really quite close to where Thomas Paine was born and where young Thomas went to school. Thomas’s father, Joseph Paine, a master stay or corset maker, was a freeman of the Borough of Thetford which entitled him to have his son educated at the Grammar School, at reduced fees. Thomas later wrote, "my parents were not able to give me a shilling beyond what they gave me in education, and to do this they distressed themselves." He probably attended the school between the ages of eight to thirteen years. On leaving school, he was then apprenticed to his father - so Thomas was definitely something of an autodidact... There were other things to see on the Thomas Paine trail, but to be honest I think I have covered the main things - others I leave to who make the time to visit to see for themselves. I should mention two other things about Thetford that are apparent from a brief strole through the town. There is a statue up here to Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of the Sikh empire before colonisation by the British East India Company in the 1840s - and who ended up living just outside Thetford for a large part of the nineteenth century. It is also impossible to miss the fact that a lot of 'Dad's Army' was filmed around Thetford - and so there is a 'Dad's Army trail' running parallel to the Thomas Paine trail. A couple of photos below by way of evidence of this in case any fans of the show read Histomat (the statue is of Captain Mainwaring): In conclusion, sad to say, I guess far more British people who visit Thetford today as tourists do so in order to visit 'The Dad's Army Museum' and go on the 'Dad's Army trail' than go like me in order to pay homage to Thomas Paine - but if just a fraction of those who go to Thetford for 'Dad's Army' leave Thetford wanting to learn a bit more about Thomas Paine - a heroic revolutionary figure and democratic thinker who has never recieved the attention he warrants in Britain itself - then that in itself is surely cause for cheer.

More on Bourgeois Revolutions

 The question of 'how revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions?' has most recently be raised by Neil Davidson in his monumental work (which I have currently got about 1/3 of the way through, and am enjoying so far) but in 1989, Alex Callinicos wrote a critically important article in International Socialism 43 on 'Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism', which is now online, and which Davidson in many ways builds upon in his study...
Edited to add: A video introducing 'Marxism and Revolution Today' with Callinicos and Davidson

New issue of Revolutionary History

The latest edition of Revolutionary History is now available to order:

European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence, 1954-1962

This summer will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence. Anyone who has seen the film Battle of Algiers may well see certain clear parallels between past events and the present: “terrorism”, torture, organising anti-war activity in workplaces and the armed forces, attitudes to a Muslim-led nationalist movement, etc. Both the similarities to and the differences from the current situation are instructive. The war remains a question of current interest in France, and full information about the role of the French state, notably in the October 1961 massacre, has only recently been available. The book considers the course of Algerian War 1954-1962, and the response of the French left. It will give the fullest account in English of the role of the revolutionary left in giving political and practical solidarity to the Algerian liberation struggle. It presents substantial extracts from Sylvain Pattieu’s, Les camarades des frères (Paris 2002), and will gives the fullest account of the role of Trotskyists in this period, drawing on documents and interviews with participants. An Appendix considers how the war has been reflected in fiction.

Contents: Introduction, Translation of Sylvain Pattieu: The Comrades Of The Brothers, Chapters 3-6, with summaries of the other chapters. Additional documents: Article by Lambert, 16 December 1955; Article by Lambert, 17 October 1957; Note on the Comité pour la Libération de Messali Hadj ; Review from Lutte Ouvrière, 22 December 1979, of Les Porteurs de valises; Extract from a text presented at an Lutte Ouvrière public meeting in March 1985; Socialisme ou barbarie; Interview with H & C Benoîts; Letters from La Vérité des travailleurs, October 1955, on conscript resistance; Article from Vérités Pour on Lenin and desertion; Article from Vérités Pour on desertion; The MNA; The role of François Mitterrand; Austria; John Baird; Report to North African Interfederal Communist Conference 1922; Reply by Hadjali 1923; Reply by Robert Louzon 1923; Algeria and 1968; Bibliography; Appendix on fiction; Cover illustrations from woodcuts of Otto Rudolf Schatz Other Contents: Work in Progress, Obituaries, Reviews. Letters.

Market: General, Undergraduate and Post-graduate; Student Reading List; Library Keywords: Colonialism, Anti-colonial struggles, Left, France, Algeria Bic: HBTQ, HBTV, JPFF, 1DDF, 1HBA 234x156 mm; approx. 410pp ISSN 0953 2382 Pbk ISBN 978 0 85036 665 5 GB Pounds £20.00

Edited to add: Ian Birchall, editor of this volume of Revolutionary History will be speaking about 'European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence' at Marxism 2012, which will also see another meeting - 'Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence' with Samir Amin, Ian Birchall & Hamza Hamouchene

On the Hans Gruber / Golden Dawn controversy

Richard Seymour has a fine analysis of the Greek elections, which together with the defeat of Sarkozy signify a large scale popular rejection of the politics of austerity across Europe (whether the electorates of France and Greece will now actually get any kind of end to such politics is another matter), but while I am here I may as well clear up one controversy that has emerged as a result of the class polarisation across Europe in the context of the crisis - the rise of the far right in France and Greece - and in particular the rise of the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn in Greece. Namely didn't Alan Rickman's character Hans Gruber mention the Golden Dawn group in the classic action film Die Hard?

Hans: The following people are to be released from their captors: In Northern Ireland, the seven members of the New Provo Front. In Canada, the five imprisoned leaders of Liberte de Quebec. In Greece, the nine members of the Golden Dawn movement...


John McClane: [listening on the radio] What the fuck?


Karl: [mouthing silently] Golden Dawn?


Hans: [covers the radio] I read about them in Time magazine...

In fact, despite rumours to the contrary and the imagined dialogue above, in fact Hans Gruber refers to a Sri Lankan group 'Asian Dawn' in Die Hard. It is important to clear stuff like this up. The more important question of course is how can the radical left in Greece and France now build on their recent successes to ensure that the politics of hope triumph over the Nazis' politics of despair. Here perhaps the anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigning taken in Britain by groups like Unite Against Fascism might serve as some sort of inspiration...

Jim Wolfreys on the French Election

You tube video here - see also his commentary here

How not to write the history of the French Left

Uncritical admirers of the late social historian Tony Judt might be advised to look away now...

Jim Wolfreys on Islamophobia and the failings of the French Left

From Socialist Worker

Islamophobic legislation acts as a substitute for measures which the government has been unable to implement and deflects attention from its own shortcomings. Why, then, is the rest of the left not exposing government racism? Where are the demonstrations in defence of France’s Muslim community? Why, in a country that has seen social movements on an unparalleled scale over the past decade and a half, has the left failed to oppose Islamophobia?

Part of the answer lies with the hold of the Republican tradition of secularism over the French left. In the late 19th century this took the form of anti-clericalism, a powerful tool against the influence of the monarchist Catholic church. But it was also, as the socialist Paul Lafargue argued, a way of getting workers “to eat priests rather than eat capitalists”.

This opened up a space for Republican nationalism to root itself in the Socialist and Communist traditions. In the 1980s, once the Socialist Party had abandoned its ambitious plans for social reform, it turned to Republican nationalism as a substitute. It invoked “Republican values” as an alternative to the rise of Le Pen. This in turn disarmed the left when Muslims were attacked during successive headscarf affairs from the late 1980s. Eventually the hijab was banned from schools in 2004.

Once a weapon against the wealth and privilege of the Catholic church, Republican secularism has become a means of scapegoating France’s oppressed Muslim minority. The ban on full-face veils is based on a series of myths – that Muslim extremism is a greater problem than Islamophobia, or that women have more freedom when the state tells them what they can wear. These myths can be challenged, but this requires a concerted and unequivocal campaign that identifies Islamophobia, and not Islam, as the enemy.

Mark Twain's tribute to the French Revolution

'The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.

There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.'
From Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), quoted here

Interview with Ilham Moussaid

The new issue of Socialist Review has a number of excellent articles one might highlight, including discussions of anti-fascist strategy and tactics necessary to tackle the racist thuggery of the EDL to Ambre Ivol remembering Howard Zinn, from Pat Stack on Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A love story to Alex Callinicos on Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth (according to Fredric Jameson 'the last and richest of the Empire trilogy...a powerful and ambitious reappropriation of the whole tradition of political theory for the Left' but actually a work which, according to Callinicos, 'hugely underestimates the extent to which the logic of capital still rules the world - and therefore the effort of critical thinking and political organisation that will be required to break its hold').

However, perhaps most noteworthy for English readers is Jim Wolfreys interview with Ilham Moussaid a candidate of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France - who - just because she herself happens to wear a headscarf - has seen her electoral campaign already (unsurprisingly) cause a hypocritical outburst of racism from the French establishment and (more positively) challenged many, not least many on the French Left, to begin to face up to the question of confronting Islamophobia.

'I've been politically active for four years now and the media reaction disturbs me because my political engagement can't be reduced to the headscarf. I'm part of an association that fights exclusion, racism and violence in the Avignon area. We offer support to young people in schools. We organise cultural and musical outings with them. We fight exclusion and discrimination in the quartiers populaires. I was also active in the collective networks against the war in Iraq, against apartheid in Palestine, and against the genocide in Rwanda and in Kosovo.

So I do all that in parallel. I was always coming across NPA activists in all these movements and a year ago I decided to join them. Now I'm treasurer of my NPA branch and things are going well. I'm active in fighting privatisation, for example, in the universities and the post office. We're active every day.

I got a very good welcome in the NPA. In the quartier populaires the NPA is something we have to make use of. It's our tool. For me it's our tool because we're building it. When the LCR became the NPA it was an opening out to the quartiers populaires. Olivier Besancenot said to us, "If you want to fight capitalism - welcome." He didn't say to us, "If you're Marxists or Leninists or Trotskyists." He just talked about capitalism because we're all against capitalism. It's the source of practically all our problems. I didn't join straight away but it's been a good experience. I already had my principles - for equality, for a better distribution of wealth - before joining the NPA, but I feel at home here. It's a political question - for me it's the best tool for our struggle.'

Hommage à Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010)

Another terribly sad blow to our side...but again, Daniel Bensaïd's revolutionary life and work should be a matter of celebration alongside commemoration and condolence. I will collect some of the tributes/obituaries etc below. There will be memorial meetings in Paris on 24 January and in central London on 9 February.

Daniel Bensaïd Internet Archive

Tariq Ali 'Remembering Daniel Bensaïd'
Alex Callinicos, 'Obituary'
Gilbert Achcar 'A revolutionary who fought steadfastly'
François Sabado 'Militant, Intellectual, Friend'
Josep María Antentas 'A revolutionary for our times'
Liberation 'Daniel Bensaïd'
Lenin's Tomb 'Mort'
Rustbelt Radical 'Tribute'

On the New Anti-capitalist Party in France

The new Socialist Review has an article by Jim Wolfrey's reporting on the founding conference of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France last month, and of the hopes generated by its formation:

The formation of the NPA is an exciting development for the left internationally. What was clear from its conference is that the party's orientation is not simply going to be focused on the electoral terrain. Nor is this another attempt to reconstitute a reformist current in the space vacated by the major social democratic parties. The project has grown out of the struggles of the past few years, struggles that have thrown up new forms within which activists have attempted to fight the neoliberal offensive.

The significant audience that the NPA has attracted to a radical political outlook gives it the potential to have an impact on these struggles. There are still many issues that will need to be debated in the new organisation. The LCR has seized the opportunity to translate bold declarations of intent into political reality and has a chance to make Marxism relevant and effective as a tool for a new generation. This will demand resourcefulness and creativity if the distinctiveness of Marxism and its heritage is to be asserted within the broader revolutionary culture.