International Socialism # 143 out now

The latest issue of the Socialist Workers Party's quarterly journal International Socialism is now available.

 Issue 143 appears as the official celebrations of the outbreak of the First World War reach their peak. Megan Trudell traces the process through which, in both the academy and the larger political establishment, class antagonism has been written out of the history of this slaughter. Paul Blackledge shows how the differences over political strategy that had been developing in the international socialist movement before 1914 crystallised thanks to the war into the great division between revolutionaries and reformists.

Andy Jones analyses UKIP's breakthrough in the European elections against the background of an increasingly toxic mainstream debate on immigration. Alex Callinicos discusses the complexities of the radical left, Donny Gluckstein looks at classical Marxism's response to reformism and John Rose recalls the tangled political struggles in Ukraine in the aftermath of the October Revolution.

Analysis examines the situation in Iraq, the political upheaval in Scotland with the forthcoming independence referendum and the complexities of Venezuela a year after the death of Hugo Chávez.

Anne Alexander reviews two important Marxist studies of the Arab revolutions and Tomáš Tengely-Evans takes on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Other books reviewed this quarter concern George Orwell, genocide, women and war, anti-fascism, early learning, education in China, social media and the redoubtable black activist Darcus Howe.

 If you don't subscribe to the journal and would like to you can do so at www.isj.org.uk or contact us at isj@swp.org.uk or 0207 819 1177. You can also get the latest issue plus various back issues at the Marxism 2014 festival www.marxismfestival.org.uk

''The Blairs have a very bloody history''

Longstanding (or perhaps more accurately, long suffering) readers of Histomat might recall a brief discussion back in 2006 on George Orwell and Suffolk, where in the comment boxes Michael Rosen among other people joined in a speculative discussion about why Eric Blair chose the pseudonym 'George Orwell'.  Today, perusing Spanish Diary by the forgotten socialist John McNair, who like Orwell went to fight in the Spanish Civil War with the Independent Labour Party contingent, I stumbled upon a passage which brings us much closer to the answer - McNair's recollections of a conversation he had with Orwell while out in Spain:

"Never mind about that; tell us, George, why you changed your original name, Eric Blair."
"Well, I hated the name Eric Blair. Eric seemed to smack of that phoney school story, 'Eric, or little by little' (Dean Farrar), and the Blairs have a very bloody history."
"But why George Orwell?" we enquired.
"I wanted a working-class name. George is good working-class, as you Geordies ought to know, and, of course, you've heard of the 'Orwell' - a good Suffolk proletarian river."

I like this quote a lot - both the bit about the River Orwell being 'proletarian', while Orwell was certainly onto something about 'the Blairs', at least if their modern descendants are anything to go by...

Was Theodor Adorno an Ipswich Town fan?

'Football implies the desire to suffer', wrote the Marxist Theodor Adorno, with all the characteristic pessimism one would expect from a thinker of the Frankfurt School, something noticed by the good people over at Philosophy Football, who have made a T-shirt in his honour. I think it highly unlikely Adorno was a fan of Ipswich Town Football Club - (unlike say George Orwell, who evidence notwithstanding I have always insisted was a quiet admirer of the currently low-flying Suffolk team*), but anyone who has followed the fortunes of Ipswich (or indeed any underperforming football team) the last few seasons will I think identify with the essential truth underpinning Adorno's statement here... * NB. The recent performances of ITFC have given some cause for optimism - it is to be hoped we might stay in the Championship this season at least...

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...

On John Cornford

Browsing George Galloway's site this morning, as one does, the following news announcement caught my eye:

George Galloway will be with host Matthew Parris on Great Lives - a weekly biographical series where each guest talks about a person in public life who is very special to them. George has chosen the poet John Cornford who was killed, tragically young, in the Spanish Civil War. He would like you to join him for 30 minutes to discover why he finds John's life so inspirational.
Broadcasting on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday the 18th of August at 4:30pm, then repeated on Friday the 21st at 11pm.
And also available on BBC iPlayer from 19th August.

The Communist poet John Cornford did indeed have a 'great' if tragically short, life - and the sacrifice of those like Cornford who gave their lives fighting fascism remains an utterly relevant inspiration for our anti-fascist struggle today. Cornford is clearly a hero for Galloway - see this characteristically short eloquent 2006 article - John Cornford and the Fight for the Spanish Republic - and his choice of a 'Great Life' and its timing - has to be applauded. However, one suspects that simply heralding Cornford as a 'fighter for the Spanish Republic' may actually miss not only some of the complexity of his politics but also downplay somewhat their revolutionary nature.

As the late great revolutionary historian Brian Pearce once noted, 'Cornford was killed in action in December 1936, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. His writings while in Spain suggest that, had he lived, his Marxist approach would have brought him into conflict with Stalinism.' Pearce referred to John Cornford: A Memoir, edited by Pat Sloan (1938), which 'consists of selections from the writings of the young man to whom the socialist movement in the universities in that period owed more than to anybody else, together with contributions by people who knew him.' As Pearce noted,

For Cornford the struggle in Spain was ‘a revolutionary war’. ‘In Catalonia at least the overwhelming majority of the big employers went over to the fascists. Thus the question of socialism was placed on the order of the day.’ The Spanish Communist Party should ‘force recognition from the government of the social gains of the revolution’. Cornford feared that the party was ‘a little too mechanical in its application of People’s Front tactics. It is still concentrating too much on trying to neutralize the petty bourgeoisie – when by far the most urgent task is to win the anarchist workers…’

Though he had no time for anarchism, Cornford saw that the main body of militant workers in the principal industrial region of Spain, around Barcelona, were anarchists, and, being a sincere communist, that meant for him that the party’s task was first and foremost to get among those workers, establish close ties with them, and win them for Marxism. The line actually taken by the Stalinists was first to stick a label on the anarchist workers (‘uncontrollables’, the 1937 equivalent of ‘Left adventurists’), then to work up a pogrom spirit against them among the followers of the Communist Party, and finally to attack and decimate them, using an armed force recruited among former policemen and the middle class.

I do hope George Galloway's discussion of Cornford will find time to condemn the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism in revolutionary Spain, though something tells me I shouldn't get my hopes up too much on this score.

Speaking of Pearce, those with access to a university library might check out the latest issue of Revolutionary Russia (v. 22, no. 1 (June 2009) which carries a long obituary alongside two tributes from academic historians, and those without might check out the latest issue of Revolutionary History which also has an obituary.

I am indebted to POUMista for drawing my attention to this photo of George Orwell - another witness to the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism in Spain of course - which as POUMista notes 'highlights the fact that Orwell, although thought of by some as a Little Englander, was fundamentally an internationalist and cosmopolitan, and in many senses a postcolonial figure.'

Finally, POUMista also drew my attention to Reading the Maps on the late Leszek Kolakowski whose passing seems to have caused no end of debate and turmoil on the blogosphere.

Meanwhile back in revolutionary Spain...

I haven't checked the Orwell Diaries for ages, but it doesn't look like I have missed a great deal (May 1939 finds him to be back in Britain and thinking about manatees of all things). Perhaps of slightly more interest is a forthcoming book by Christopher Hall, 'Not just Orwell’: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War. As the author notes,

Until now the role of the ILP contingent in the Spanish Civil War has been overshadowed by the fame of George Orwell, and any examination of the ILP volunteers has centred on him. This book includes a brief biography of Orwell as his book Homage to Catalonia is still a major source for any discussion of the ILP contingent. Orwell’s account also provides invaluable descriptions of the way the Spanish militias were organised, trained and armed. As its title clearly states, this book is not solely about Orwell but about the volunteers who served with him.
The book provides the first full account of the ILP contingent’s role in Spain, alongside a list of those men who served in the contingent and their experiences. Stafford Cottman became a friend and advisor to the film director Ken Loach when he was making his 1995 film ‘Land and Freedom’, which was loosely based on Cottman’s experiences. According to his wife, Stella, Cottman attended a film premiere in Bath for ‘Land and Freedom’, and afterwards said: "George Orwell always said, ‘The truth about what happened to the republican cause in Spain will never be told.’ But now it has been." I hope in some small way this book has a similar impact and changes people’s perception of the role of the ILP in the Spanish Civil War.

According to the books publisher, I also learn that in Cannes 'a film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia has been announced to star Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey...'

A warning from the future

There was something distinctly different about this years Labour Party conference, but it was difficult to put one's finger on exactly what that was...

From 2018: A Novel

The alarm clock was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Oliver Kamm wrenched his body out of bed — naked, despite a Times Leader Writer received only £3,000 pounds monthly, and a suit of pyjamas was only £60 — and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Oliver's mind the impression made by his dream. He was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late sixties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

Oliver could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood. War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 2018 (if it was 2018), America was at war with Russia and in alliance with China. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Oliver well knew, it was only four years since America had been at war with China and in alliance with Russia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. America was at war with Russia: therefore America had always been at war with Russia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that America had never been in alliance with Russia. He, Oliver Kamm, knew that America had been in alliance with Russia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’

Oliver sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the nineties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Oliver could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — ‘English Socialism’, that is to say — it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Oliver pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Oliver's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Oliver examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 14.3.17 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.17 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.17 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.8.18 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons chomsky rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Oliver laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures...

George Orwell Blogs! (sort of)

'It appears from reliable private information that Sir O. Mosley is a masochist of the extreme type in his sexual life.'

So wrote George Orwell in his diary on 29 August 1939*. If only Orwell were still around to see that certain things seem to run in the family of the British Union of Fascist leader...

Anyway, instead, we will have to make do with the fact that Orwell's old diaries will be serialised online starting from tomorrow, day by day, here. Orwell I think would not only have approved of the blogosphere, he is a very much needed new presence in it given the kind of idiocy which currently dominates it, not least from those who claim to stand in his legacy yet cheer on imperialist war.


*Thanks to this weeks Private Eye for bringing this to my attention.

In defence of Animal Farm

My good comrade over at 'I.R.' has written an entertaining and typically witty post on the apparent problems confronted by a socialist when teaching George Orwell's fairy tale Animal Farm in school. The crucial passage is as follows:

Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, despite Orwell's protestations to the contrary, Animal Farm is, at root, a profoundly conservative book. It is impossible to ignore the central message of the story - the one that overwhelms the reader - i.e. that radical social change is bound to end in disaster because the irredeemably selfish, scheming, power-hungry and callous nature of human beings always asserts itself in the end. The pigs - Napoleon and Squealer, particularly, turn nasty for no reason other than the fact that this is, somehow, in their natures. The pigs, of course, are us - or, at least, us given the slightest sniff of power. There is no serious reference to the various concrete material factors that may have constributed to the rapid degeneration and failure of socialism in Russia. Things go wrong in Animal Farm because it is pre-ordained that they go wrong. It is written in the genes. My personal opinion is that Animal Farm is an awful book - it's philosophically and politically simplistic, resting on hand-waving appeals to some odd, half-articulated, semi-metaphysical entity, stuffed to the seams with conservative normative assumptions, called 'human nature', and it's horribly mean to pigs.

Regretfully, I have to take issue with the assessment of Animal Farm as 'an awful book'. In terms of literature, as a novel, it is incredibly readable and has carefully, well drawn memorable characters, while politically it stands as a devastatingly powerful satire on Stalinism, and totalitarian rule in general. Personally, looking back, when I read it at school as a young anti-capitalist - and I was not taught by a noticeably left wing English teacher - I like to think it helped in some way shift me from my early sympathies for the former USSR and former Eastern bloc - towards Trotskyism. This is not to say there are not weaknesses, relating to the isolation and disillusion with the possibilities for revolutionary change of Orwell himself at the time of writing. As I pointed out on this blog back in August 2005, (crudely paraphrasing an article by John Molyneux on Animal Farm from an old issue of International Socialism):

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. Orwell's failure to acknowledge the devastating impact of the Russian Civil War is also relevant here, to say nothing of his pessimism about the possibilities of working class resistance under Stalinism. However, 'Animal Farm' is a novel - if you want to know more about the Russian Revolution read Trotsky himself as well as Tony Cliff's 'State Capitalism in Russia'.

Indeed, it is redeemable as a book if only for a conversation I overheard a few years ago on a crowded bus through town. Two young women students were quite loudly discussing Animal Farm which they were obviously studying for something or another, and while neither of them had any particularly deep understanding of the Russian Revolution, one of them did correctly note that 'Snowball' was meant to be 'Leon Trotsky.' At that moment, it dawned on me that if it was not for the teaching of Animal Farm in school, in all likelihood almost all schoolkids in Britain would emerge without ever having even heard of one of the most important revolutionary Marxists of the twentieth century. Indeed, in what other possible context would the name Leon Trotsky just come up in an everyday conversation? For that reason alone, socialists today surely stand indebted to George Orwell and to Animal Farm.

PS. Quite irrelevant really, but there was a quite interesting article about Orwell and hypocrisy in politics in the Guardian over the weekend. As Orwell was quoted as saying (from a defence of PG Wodehouse), 'All kinds of petty rats are hunted down, while almost without exception the big rats escape.' When I read that quote, I instinctively found myself thinking of the pro-war 'left', which claims to stand in Orwell's tradition of radical journalism but is purely concerned with hunting down petty rats while letting big rats like Bush and Blair escape their crimes.

The hidden history of the Second World War

Was Churchill an 'anti-fascist freedom fighter' or an imperialist gangster?

On the 28 July 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, George Orwell declared that 'I should be the last to claim that we are morally superior to our enemies, and there is quite a strong case for saying that British imperialism is worse than Nazism.' Such anti-imperialist sentiment has thrown a few members of the soft Left blogosphere into shock. 'I’m still trying to get over it!!!' declares one. 'British Imperialism is morally superior to Nazism'!

Andy Newman of the Socialist Unity group provides comfort, declaring 'Socialists were 100% correct to support the war against fascism' and insists that 'Winston Churchill fought fascism':

'There was both an inter-imperialist rivalry AND a popular anti-fascist war running at the same time. This was why the political battle within Britain for the opening of a second front, for independence of the British colonies, and full implementation of Beveridge were so important, in determining the nature of the war...of course the British Empire was monstrous, but arguing that British imperialism was the main enemy when faced with fascism would have been madness.'

However, there is surely a problem with labelling the Second World War a 'popular anti-fascist war' with just 'inter-imperialist rivalry' tagged on - as Chris Bambery has argued in a recent short series of three articles about the Second World War for Socialist Worker, which those interested ought to read:

How the great powers appeased Hitler
Bloody conflict over competing empires
Crushing the tide of left wing resistance.

The idea that it was a 'popular anti-fascist war' was how that section of the British ruling class around Churchill who wanted to defend the British Empire against Hitler had to sell such a war to the British working class (who were going to have to actually do the fighting) in order to win the argument against the section of the British ruling class happy to make a deal with Hitler.

Churchill had to rely on his friends in the press and the Labour Party to launch a campaign against the Tory appeasers. That required stressing that this was an anti-fascist war. In the summer of 1940, pro-war left wingers were deployed against Tory defeatists. Churchill hoped this was a short term expedient. He was not fighting fascism as such, but defending the British Empire

The Second World War is therefore best seen as an imperialist war 'about the repartition of the world among the great powers'.

It was a continuation of the 1914-18 conflict. What made it different was the ideological question – millions of working people understood fascism posed a mortal danger to them and had to be resisted.

Accordingly, the mood of the British working class throughout the war was not that of jingoistic joy at being sent to fight and die in another bloody conflict - but rather resigned fate that there was no other alternative if Hitler was to be stopped coupled with a growing mood of militancy against the old rulers who had got them into this mess.

The left wing tide swept Britain too. But there was no force that could carry the tide beyond parliamentary limits. In 1940 Labour had backed Churchill. The Communists were anti-war until June 1941, following Stalin’s line. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia they opposed strikes, urging maximum production for the war effort. In the absence of any effective lead from the left, people’s attitude was generally that “Hitler was a bastard and we needed a bastard to fight him – Churchill”. But once the war was won people voted Churchill out.

Elsewhere in Europe, where left wing Resistance movements helped to bring down Nazi occupation, there were glimpses of the potential for the Second World War ending as the First World War had, with imperialist war being turned into civil war and workers revolution - but these movements were betrayed by the Stalinists and social democrats and successfully crushed by the old rulers.

How did the old rulers who had taken society into the bloodshed and horror of the First World War and then supported the rise of Hitler and Mussolini coming to power as a bulwark against the threat of Communist revolution survive? Why didn't the imperialist war end in socialist revolution?

Today I came across an article written in 1995 by socialist historian Raymond Challinor, published in Critique entitled 'The Second World War and its Hidden Agenda'. That 'Hidden Agenda' was the need to stop the possibility of the war ending in workers' revolution - a fear which haunted the leaders of all the capitalist countries.

On August 25 1939, three days after the Nazi Soviet Pact had been signed, Hitler met with Robert Coulandre, the French Ambassador to Germany.

'Hitler told Coulandre he was proud of his agreement - he described it as "a realistic pact" - and went on to express his "regrets" if it consequently led to French and German blood being spilled. "But," Coulandre objected, "Stalin displayed great double-dealing. The real victor in case of war will be Trotsky. Have you thought that over?" "I know" der Fuhrer responded'

As Challinor notes, the interview evoked a comment from Trotsky. His name had been used, he said, because Hitler and Coulandre liked "to give a personal name to the spectre of revolution". But this is not the essence of this dramatic conversation..."War will inevitably provoke revolution," the representative of imperialist democracy, himself chilled to the marrow, frightens his adversary. "I know," Hitler responds, as if it were a question decided long ago. "I know." Astonishing dialogue! Both of them, Coulandre and Hitler, represent the barbarism which advances over Europe. At the same time, neither of them doubts that their barbarism will be conquered by socialist revolution'.

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Challinor describes an intriguing meeting at the French Embassy in London on 14 August. 'Present were General de Gaulle, Marceau Pivot of the French PSOP and John McNair, general secretary of the [British] Independent Labour Party. The aim was to explore the feasibility of co-ordinating action of revolutionary socialists and the Free French. From the outset of the discussion, Pivert and McNair conceded their objectives were mutually incompatible - de Gaulle wanted to see a capitalist France, they wanted a socialist France. Yet, both were anti-Hitler and sought to end Nazi occupation. Did this not provide the basis for some co-operation?'

Yet despite the fact Pivert cited how the Bolsheviks and French army had worked together to save both capitalist France and the Soviet Union in early 1918 when faced with a German military assault on Russia, de Gaulle refused to collaborate - 'anxious to accrue greater backing from the existing power structures, de Gaulle understood even the remotest association with revolutionary socialists would be, from his standpoint, counter-productive. To acquire the backing from the British political establishment, as well as to have any appeal to the French upper classes, de Gaulle realised he must remain strictly inside the limits of political orthodoxy. A crucial lesson learnt by the ruling classes of the various capitalist countries from the First World War was the touchpaper of revolution must not be lit: short term military gain must not be purchased at the expense of endangering long-term capitalist stability.'

Challinor also notes the decision by the German High Command during the First World War to let Lenin re-enter Russia through Switzerland in the sealed train - only to find that once back in Russia, Lenin's Bolsheviks not only made a revolution which got Russia out of the bloody First World War through making a revolution as the German ruling class hoped - the Russian Revolution then inspired German troops to mutiny and this helped spell the end of the German Kaiser through a revolutionary upheaval at home!

Challinor's conclusion seems a fitting point to close this discussion:

'Unwittingly the various ruling classes had contributed to their undoing, by the creation of convulsions of revolution that rocked Europe for years after the First World War. From that fearful experience, they learnt the crucial lesson: the train to Finland Station must never be permitted to run again. Neither of the two warring camps in the Second World War did anything that might aid or comfort revolutionary socialists. They realised the potentialities for rebellion were much greater than in the previous conflict, and therefore it would be hazardous to give them any encouragement. Reinforcing their conservative caution came the bureaucracies of social democracy and Stalinism. Together they ensured that Trotsky's prediction that the Second World War would end in a socialist revolution did not happen.'

Orwell and the blogosphere

Given this weeks Socialist Worker has an article which suggests George Orwell might well have approved of blogging, I thought I would just put up two great little Orwell quotes, dating from 1939 and typical of his writing in the period just after he had returned to Britain from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and which I think might illuminate some of the current fraternal debates between those socialists who remain inside the Labour Party in Britain and those of us trying to build Respect as an alternative.

'a Left-wing party, which, within a capitalist society, becomes a war party, has already thrown up the sponge, because it is demanding a policy which can only be carried out by its opponents' (1939).

'Nothing is likely to save us except the emergence within the next two years of a real mass party whose first pledges are to refuse war and to right imperial injustice.'(1939).

Only a poor little budgie

Well, its not quite the race to replace Blair, but Norwich City Football Club are looking for a new manager after recent poor performances mean they have sacked Nigel Worthington. However, while the hapless Worthington is undoubtedly no Jim Magilton (Ipswich's dynamic new manager), it might be noted that a quick glance at the Championship Table reveals that Ipswich are only three points above them (and only just above Colchester) - and yet many Town fans are optimistically hoping for 'automatic promotion' this year...

On the subject of Ipswich, if not quite Ipswich Town Football Club, Paul Anderson has an interesting article on 'George Orwell and Suffolk' which I will republish below:

'The obvious connection between George Orwell and Suffolk is the surname the aspiring author Eric Blair adopted as a pseudonym in 1932: the River Orwell is the tidal estuary that links Ipswich to the sea. But his Suffolk connections go further than that.

As a 17-year-old schoolboy at Eton, he spent much of the Xmas holiday of 1920-21 with cousins of his father in Burstall, a small village just west of Ipswich, where – as we know from a letter written to a friend – he picked up a large cage rat-trap, which several biographers suggest was the prototype for the cage full of rats that finally breaks Winston Smith’s resistance to torture in Orwell’s last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A year later, after he left Eton, he and his family – his father Richard, a retired colonial administrator then in his early 60s, his mother Ida, nearly 18 years younger than her husband, and his younger sister Avril – moved from the home counties to the small Suffolk coastal town of Southwold, to a rented house in Stradbroke Road near the lighthouse. (His elder sister Marjorie, five years his senior, had married and left home the previous year.)

The young Eric spent six months at a crammer in the town swotting up for imperial police service exams which he took and passed before going off to Burma as a colonial policeman. Not much is known about this time in Southwold apart from the fact that he got into trouble for sending a dead rat to the borough surveyor as a joke birthday present.

He came back from Burma on leave in 1927 and after a couple of months announced to his parents, who had by this point moved to another rented house, in Queen Street, right in the centre of town and near South Green, that he had decided to quit his job in Burma and become a writer. For the next eight years, Southwold was his main base – though he spent a lot of time away.

In late 1927 he moved to lodgings in London, where he experienced for the first time the poverty of the East End, then the next year went to Paris, where his aunt lived, in an attempt to make it as a freelance. But he ran out of money and turned to working as a washer-up to try to make ends meet – an experience that eventually made its way into Down and Out in Paris and London – before admitting defeat and returning to Southwold just before Xmas 1929. Feeling a failure, he took a job looking after what he called “an imbecile boy” in the nearby village of Walberswick.

The job did not last, but he didn’t leave the town for good until late 1934 – though he often went off in 1930-31, dressed as a tramp, to do the research for what became Down and Out; and in 1932-33 he worked in suburban west London as a teacher, an occupation he was forced to give up by illness. Not only Down and Out (published in 1933) but also the novels Burmese Days (1934) and A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) were written largely in Southwold. A Clergyman’s Daughter starts and ends in a Suffolk town, Knype Hill, at least partially based on Southwold.

His family had been living in genteel poverty until the early 1930s, but an inheritance and Avril’s success at running a tea room made them comfortably off. They bought a house in the High Street and became pillars of respectable society – Orwell’s father a familiar figure in the posher of the local golf clubs and his mother a doyenne of the ladies’ bridge circuit.

Orwell said he didn’t like Southwold, and the best bits of A Clergyman’s Daughter – a novel he later dismissed as “tripe” – are a vicious satire on the parochialism of provincial small-town life, including tea rooms. The chief protagonist of the novel, Dorothy Hare, is the dutiful daughter of a rector, and her reputation is destroyed by a malicious gossip.

But he had lots of friends there, including one woman, Eleanor Jaques, with whom he had an affair, and another, Brenda Salkeld, the gym mistress at St Felix girl’s school, whom he wooed unsuccessfully for several years and on whom Dorothy Hare was loosely based. And his distaste for the place did not prevent him visiting it regularly after he left, the last time in early 1944 after the death of his mother. (His father died in 1939.)

People apart, there was something about the bleakness of “the low, barely undulating East Anglian landscape” that Orwell liked. Although it was “intolerably dull in summer”, it was “redeemed in winter by the recurring patterns of the elms, naked and fanshaped against leaden skies”. Seventy years later, I feel much the same way. It's just a pity all the elms have died.'

John Pilger on Empire: war and propaganda

In the New Statesman. It ends: 'I think Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a tale of the ultimate empire:

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive".'

For further discussion of the American Empire, check out Doug Nesbitt's review of John Rees's Imperialism and Resistance.

On the latest from Lebanon, see Lebanon Updates as well as here, which quotes Dante: 'The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.'

Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University, meanwhile has written a detailed discussion of British sea power: A 21st century question, which looks at Britain's attempt to play its role in this 'New World Order'.

Finally, those interested in Cuba's past and present might be interested in Chris Harman's article in the latest ISJ, as well as Louis Proyect's comments on Sam Farber.

Edited to add details of the next national demo in London:

The decline and fall of the English Murder

'It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions and soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.'

So began George Orwell's 1946 essay, Decline of the English Murder. He went on to draw a rather strange distinction between the 'good murders' of old, and the rather random killings one read about in the News of the World of the day. The 'old domestic poisoning dramas' like that of Dr Crippen were the 'product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them'. However, since the 'war period', characterised by fear of death from above by 'the doodle-bugs', 'the readers of Sunday papers...say fretfully that "you never seem to get a good murder nowadays"'.

Orwell was certainly right to note than if you a living under a world system where thousands of innocent people die during war every year then life is cheapened somewhat. But arguably the 'decline of the English murder' was taking place, albeit in another way to that envisaged by Orwell.

The inter-war period in England was the golden age of the detective story. The way to success had already of course been paved by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective Sherlock Holmes (1880s-1890s). This was all about using what Doyle called 'the science of Deduction and Analysis' to outwit criminal masterminds. Ironically, in lauding a brainy, Bohemian violin playing drug addict like Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was hardly saying very much for his own law abiding Victorian bourgeois values. However, it is the likes of Agatha Christie with Poirot and Miss Marple (1920s-30s), and GK Chesterton's Father Brown stories (1930s) that stand as the classics of the genre. In general, they had a rather strict formula which they followed. Murder at the start, a small number of characters who were all in the vicinity and so are 'suspects' and more importantly do not leave the crime scene, a short timespan, and no arch villains (as in Conan Doyle). The motives were limited to greed, revenge, jealousy etc and in general are not of interest. The drama is about solving the mystery, and the stage now shifted from the foggy streets of London and Paris to more refined surroundings such as the drawing room of an English country house, or aboad an Oriental express train or Egyptian river cruise. Upper class settings and values dominate these novels. Their success in large part rested on their ability to tap into middle class nostalgia for the pre-First World War world, which appealed after the dislocation and bloodshed of the 'Great War'.

However, after the Second World War, things changed again and the decline of the English murder now took place. This was due to a number of factors, not least the rise of organised crime. Events like the St Valentine's Day massacre (1929) and bosses like Al Capone in the US had permeated into the consciousness of people internationally. As the late Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel noted in his 'social history of the crime story', Delightful Murder (1984), 'the coming of age of organised crime tolled the death knell of the drawing room detective story. It is impossible to imagine Hercule Poirot, not to mention Lord Peter Wimsey or Father Brown, battling against the Mafia.'

The turn to stories about professional cops as the new heroes around the time of the Second World War is described by Mandel as 'the first great revolution in the crime novel'. Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was still a traditional private eye, but in other ways epitomises the new turn back to the mean streets. As Mandel notes, 'social corruption, especially among the rich, now moves into the centre of the plots, along with brutality'. The leisurely pace of an Agatha Christie novel was replaced by direct hard hitting dialogue. The new heroes increasingly were not little old ladies like Miss Marple but spys and secret agents like Ian Fleming's James Bond. However, not all crime novels celebrate imperialist state power or the forces of 'law and order' - some highlight the contradictions and hypocrisies of capitalist society.



Take my favorite crime story, Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969), an absolute classic. Mandel describes the background to the writing of this novel, noting Puzo had 'earlier demonstrated a critical social consciousness, in his efforts to stigmatise in an almost Swiftian manner - the resemblances between bourgeois society and the criminal environment in the United States. One of his first essays bore the title: "How crime keeps America healthy, wealthy, cleaner and more beautiful." In another, Puzo wrote "How are we to adjust to a society that drafts human beings to fight a war, yet permits its businessmen to make a profit from the shedding of blood? As society becomes more criminal, the well-adjusted citizen, by defintion, must become more and more criminal." His portrayal of the top American criminal 'Don Corleone' as the best adjusted American citizen took things to their logical conclusion.

My favorite bit of dialogue is when Michael Corleone is talking to his fiance, Kay. "My father is no different than any other powerful man -- any man who's responsible for other people, like a senator or president." Kay replies that "You know how naive you sound...senators and presidents don't have men killed." "Oh, who's being naive, Kay?"

With the current state of permanent war, one hopes that we see more of such anti-capitalist crime novels.

Overall, it appears Orwell was right to note back in 1946 that there are just no 'good murders' anymore. We get random stabbings today to the tune of F16s overhead. As Mandel noted, 'growing militarisation on the one hand, and children screaming "I'll run a knife into you" at their mothers or school teachers on the other, are just two polar expressions of the same historical trend'. The next time you hear Blair talking about getting tough on 'anti-social behaviour' and 'yobs', remember who the real criminals are.


P.S. Karl Marx himself wrote about the relationship between bourgeois civilisation and crime, in for example, his Theories of Surplus Value, here

The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. Thus he gives a stimulus to the productive forces. While crime takes a part of the superfluous population off the labour market and thus reduces competition among the labourers—up to a certain point preventing wages from falling below the minimum—the struggle against crime absorbs another part of this population. Thus the criminal comes in as one of those natural “counterweights” which bring about a correct balance and open up a whole perspective of “useful” occupations.
The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of bank-notes have reached its present perfection had there been no 183 forgers? Would the microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary commerce (see Babbage) but for trading frauds? Doesn’t practical chemistry owe just as much to adulteration of commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest zeal for production? Crime, through its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines. And if one leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn’t the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

A quick question about George Orwell...

...and it's not, how fucking prophetic was this guy? No, I recently read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell for the first time - and I can recommend it, like most of his stuff, as a great little read to Histomat readers. I found 'Paris' far more entertaining than 'London' in Orwell's account, but that is neither here nor there really.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, it suddenly hit me, why did Orwell chose the name 'Snowball' to represent Trotsky in Animal Farm? In 1984, 'Goldstein' is clearly Bronstein - Trotsky's original surname. In Animal Farm Old Major as Marx is fairly clear (Marx was often called the 'Old Man' or 'Old Moor'), Napoleon as Stalin fits well enough for fairly obvious reasons, but Snowball? Snowball is random as fuck.

This matters to me as I chose the name 'Snowball' as a blogger. 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. Orwell's failure to acknowledge the devastating impact of the Russian Civil War is also relevant here, to say nothing of his pessimism about the possibilities of working class resistance under Stalinism. However, 'Animal Farm' is a novel - if you want to know more about the Russian Revolution read Trotsky himself as well as Tony Cliff's 'State Capitalism in Russia'.

But back to the question - why did Orwell chose the name Snowball to represent Trotsky? Was Orwell saying something about his attitude to Trotsky? Was Trotsky for Orwell a potent weapon against Stalinism but one who ultimately had melted away to nothing (as in Animal Farm)? Or was Orwell trying to say something positive about the Trotskyist movement, hoping that it would 'snowball' in size, and grow rapidly into something substantial? Anyway, answers and thoughts on a postcard to the usual address - the best response might well recieve some sort of reward...

The roar of bombs and the deep sleep of England

The seventh of July ("7/7") will be one of those dates that remains engraved on the consciousness of British people for the foreseeable future at least. Everyone will remember where they were and what they were doing when the London bombs went off. Personally, I was on a train from Colchester to London Liverpool Street station at the time. No one knew what was happening, but there was talk of a 'power surge' and then a train crash of some sort. The train stopped at Chelmsford, then turned back.

The London bombs were the bitter fruit of British foreign policy with respect to the Muslim world, in particular in the Middle East. If you are going to declare a war on 'terrorism', then it is probably important to avoid acting like a terrorist state yourself. If you are going to bomb another country, then don't be surprised or shocked if you get bombed back. Blair's regime can blame 'evil' Islamists to its hearts content for the attacks, but it is only doing so to avoid taking its fair share of the blame for what happened.

It is not surprising that the British Government and mass media want to divert attention from what is going on in Baghdad and towards what is going on in Beeston. What is now happening in Iraq, where deaths from bombings happen on a daily if not hourly basis, gives the lie to the myth that the 'British tradition' is somehow free from violence and oppression, a myth that is being pumped out today by politicians and media commentators. The Queen declares 'our way of life' will not be disturbed by the bombings, as if the lives of British people was only one of sitting around drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Blair talks of British 'civilisation', and the bumbling idiot Boris Johnson talks of the need for the 're-Britannification of Britain'. In the Telegraph, Johnson complained that if only more British teenagers knew more about British history, then school kids would not become suicide bombers as they would be 'proud' of Britain's achievements. He thought it a real problem that so few school kids knew which 'great Briton' defeated the Spanish Armada. Yeah, because Francis Drake's moral vision ("There is plenty of time to win this game, and to trash the Spaniards too") is such a helpful one in the twenty-first century.

In fact, if more school kids did learn about the real history of British imperialism they might actually have a better hope of understanding the present crisis. When asked what he thought of 'Western civilisation' on a visit to Britain in 1931, Gandhi, who had been imprisoned by the British for demanding Indian independence, said he thought it would be a good idea. Yet Gandhi did find a spirit of solidarity with his struggle in Britain. It was not to be found among the ruling elite of Britain, still less among the then Labour Government which offered fine words but little else, but among ordinary people such as the cotton workers he visited in Lancashire.

It is this spirit of internationalism, solidarity and tolerance that has defined ordinary people in Britain at their best. We saw that spirit on the streets of London during the huge anti-war protests in 2003, and actually there is every chance that we will see it again in the aftermath of the bombings. Indeed, if the media told the real story about what was going on now in Beeston, they would report of 300 hundred local people at a vigil to commemorate the victims of the bombings on Thursday lunchtime. The worlds media were there, but few reported their two minutes silence. Why? Because it showed Muslims and Christians, black, asian and white, all united together as a community. If the racist backlash against Muslims is to be resisted, then such unity from below will be of critical importance. New Labour, with their talk of 'rooting out' the 'evil' in Muslim communities, can only further spread mistrust and suspicion.

More importantly, the new unity from below after the bombings can be the bedrock for a new unity for peace and justice. As Seamus Milne pointed out in the Guardian, the disasterous war on Iraq is key to understanding why London was targeted, something only really George Galloway has so far articulated among the members of Parliament. Another George, George Orwell once warned of the 'deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.' We have heard the bombs roar. The political establishment desperately hope that ordinary people stay 'asleep', without raising awkward questions about why what happened happened. But the necessary drastic change in British foreign policy that is so badly needed can only come about as a result of us asking such questions of authority again and again in our millions.

Edited to add a couple of links relating to the aftermath of the bombings in Leeds - see here and
here