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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Shelley:The Trumpet of a Prophecy(June 1975)From International Socialism (1st series), No.79, June 1975, pp.26-32.Downloaded with thanks from REDS – Die RotenMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I have come to Shelley far too late, and for that I blame my accursed education. I still have the small dark blue text book Shelley by Richard Hughes, which was forced down my throat at school.There is no suggestion in the volume that Shelley had any ideas whatever. He was interested, apparently, in skylarks, clouds, west winds, Apollo, Pan and Arethusa.At University College, Oxford, on the way to the football changing rooms, I would pass each week a ridiculous monument to Shelley, a great dome-shaped sepulchre in which lies a smooth-limbed, angelic young man, carried by sea lions. His limbs arc naked, perfect white, his expression is heavenly, and his genitals have been painted out (once, 1 think, even broken off) by civilised young gentlemen celebrating the rare successes of University College Boat Club. An embarrassed type-written note by the monument states that Shelley was a student of University College in 1810. I recall a senior don telling me at some boring dinner: ‘Shelley, poor fellow. He was drowned while at college.’ In fact, he was expelled in his second term for writing The Necessity of Atheism, the first attack on the Christian religion ever published in English.In my last year at school, we were obliged to buy the new Penguin edition of Shelley, edited by a Tory lady of letters, Isobel Quigly. Her introduction told us: ‘There was about Shelley a nobility of spirit, a height of purpose, a kind of fine-grainedness that is a quality of birth and cannot be grown to.’ Miss Quigly detected someone from her own class.She went on:‘He was in spirit the most essentially romantic of the poets of his age, and his faults were all faults of an overabundant and undisciplined imagination. No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety.’So Miss Quigly set about cutting with a will. She castrated Shelley far more effectively than did the rowing oafs of University College, Oxford. Every single expression of radical or revolutionary opinion is cut out of the poems which follow. Poems, like Queen Mab, whose main purpose was political, are cut to a couple of ‘lyrical’ stanzas. This censorship has been going on for more than a hundred and thirty years: Every school generation is taught to read Shelley, as Quigly suggested, for his ‘lyric poetry’.Ever since the 1840s, distinguished bourgeois critics have united in declaring Shelley one of the greatest English lyric poets. They could not ignore his genius, so they claimed his ‘fine-grainedness’ for their class.In the same breath, they forgot about, distorted or censored his ideas.These critics were formed not only to re-write Shelley s poetry, but also to forget about what happened to him when he was alive. The endless stream of Shelley biographies written from about 1870 onwards made light of the most significant feature of the poet’s short life: his persecution by the authorities, political, legal and literary. In 1812, when still a lad of 19, he was hounded out of Devon by the Home Office for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet about Ireland. Had he not left Devon when he did, he would almost certainly have been prosecuted (as was one man who put up Shelley’s posters – and was sent to prison for six months).Fleeing from Devon, he settled in Wales, and worked as an agent on a reservoir scheme. This was a time of growing working class agitation, especially in Wales. Despite the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, small strikes were constantly breaking out – even on the reservoir. Shelley became so friendly with the workers, and such an ardent advocate of their cause, that the local Tory landowner, Captain Pilfold, hired a gunman to assassinate him. The gunman missed, twice, but Shelley bad to leave home again.When Shelley’s first wife committed suicide, he was refused custody of his two children by the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, who felt that nice upper class children should not be handed over to a man of Shelley’s ‘dangerous’ political views.Worst of all, however, was the treatment of his writing. Few of the Shelley worshippers of the last century or this have bothered to explain how it was that the ‘greatest lyric poet in English history’ had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published during his lifetime. Prometheus Unbound sold about 20 copies. The original edition of Queen Mab didn’t sell any. The string of political poems which Shelley wrote about the massacre of trade unionists and their families at Peterloo in 1819 were not published – for fear of prosecution for seditious libel.During all his life, this ‘greatest of English lyric poets’ made precisely £40 from his writing – and that from a trashy novel he wrote when he was still at school!In 1818, Shelley’s longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, was reviewed in the High Tory Quarterly by John Coleridge, who had been Shelley’s prefect at Eton.A section of the review gives a fair picture of what the literary establishment, which later adopted him, thought of Shelley at the time:‘Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws ... He would abolish the rights of property ... be would overthrow the constitution ... he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. Marriage he cannot endure ... finally as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in religion.’For this, Coleridge hoped, Shelley would sink ‘like lead to the bottom of the ocean’. When Shelley was drowned, in the Gulf of Spezia three years later, the Courier, as respectable in its time as the Daily Telegraph is today, trumpeted: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or no.’"
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"content": "The reviewers hated him because of his political opinions – just as reviewers and English teachers of later years came to adore him in spite of his political opinions. While Shelley was alive, his work was censored in total by the authorities. When he was dead, the censorship persisted, selectively, but no less insidiously.The only part of the preface to his poem Hellas which deals with the prospects for English revolution was cut out in all the editions of his poetry for 71 years. The most comprehensive statement of his political position – a 100-page book entitled The Philosophical View of Reform – was suppressed for 100 years. Even when it was produced – in 1920 – it was circulated privately to devotees of the Shelley Society. Now, at last, a glorious book [1] has been published which tells something like the true story. Shelley, it makes plain, was neither a fiend nor a saint. He was, indeed, perhaps the finest poet ever to write in English. But he was also, inseparably, a relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation. he was an atheist and a republican. He sided on every occasion with the masses when they rose against their oppressors: not just when the middle classes rose against feudal monsters in Mexico, Greece or Spain – but also when workers and trade unionists rose against what Shelley called ‘the pelting wretches of the new aristocracy’ – the bourgeoisie. The most casual reading of Shelley makes one thing plain: the genius of his poetry is inextricably entwined with his revolutionary convictions.When he was 19, Shelley wrote the most overtly revolutionary of all his long poems: Queen Mab. He published 250 copies at his own expense, and circulated about 70. (The Investigator got hold of a copy ten years later and described it, predictably, as ‘an execrable publication’ which would produce ‘unmingled horror and disgust’ among all decent readers.)In 1821, Shelley s last year, a radical publisher called William Clark started selling pirate editions of Queen Mab on street bookstalls. Clark was duly prosecuted by the Society for the Prosecution of Vice – led by the Mary Whitehouses of that time – and was forced to take the book off the stalls. The courageous publisher, Richard Carlile, immediately published another edition, and another. Three months after Shelley’s death, there were four cheap editions of Queen Mab circulating in the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham – many of them bought by small working class societies or illegal trade unions, and read out loud at workers’ meetings.Carlile went on publishing Queen Mab, even when he was sent to prison for ‘sedition’.Richard Holmes writes: ‘The number is not certain but between 1823 and 1841, it has been reckoned, fourteen or more separate editions were published.’ The effect on the rising trade union movement and especially on the Chartists rebellion was electric. Hundreds of thousands of workers were brought to socialist and radical ideas by this extraordinary poem. In an essay on Shelley, written in 1892, Bernard Shaw rote:‘Same time ago, Mr. H.S. Salt, in the course of a lecture on Shelley, mentioned, on the authority of Mrs. Marx Aveling, who had it from her father, Karl Marx, that Shelley had inspired a good deal of that huge badly-managed popular effort called the Chartist Movement. An old Chartist who was present and who seemed at first much surprised by this statement rose to confess that now he came to think of it (apparently for the first time) it was through reading Shelley that he got the ideas that led him to join the Chartists.‘A little further inquiry elicited that Queen Mab was known as the Chartists’ bible, and Mr Buxton Forman’s collection of small, cheap copies, blackened with the finger-marks of many heavy-banded trades, are the proof that Shelley became a power – a power that is still growing.’What the gentlemen of letters censored was dug out and reprinted by the working class movementRead Queen Mab and you will see why. Remember that it was written in 1812, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars when the whole British ruling class was terrified by the French revolution. The extent of misery in the growing British working class was indescribable. In order to suppress the trade unions, and to enforce the Combination Acts, the Tory government moved troops into all Britain’s industrial cities. The Luddites, who had organised to protect their jobs by smashing the machinery, were remorselessly butchered on the scaffold. Production and the war were kept going by prolonged and unremitting terror.In Queen Mab, the spirit of a young girl is wafted into the stratosphere by a Fairy Queen, who shows her the world, distorted and corrupted by wars and exploitation. The Spirit shrinks in horror at the inevitability of it all.Queen Mab replies:‘I see thee shrink,Surpassing spirit – wert thou human else.I see a shade of doubt and horror fleetAcross thy stainless features: yet fear not;This is no unconnected misery,Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable.Man’s evil nature, that apology,Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set upFor their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the bloodWhich desolates the discord-wasted land.NATURE, No!Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower’The poem is about those kings, priests and statesmen. Here are the priests:Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,Without a hope, a passion or a loveWho, through a life of luxury and lies,Have crept by flattery to the seat of power,Support the system whence their honours flow.:They have three words, (well tyrants know their use,Well pay them for the loan, with usuryTorn from a bleeding world) – God, Hell and Heaven.A vengeful, pitiless and Almighty fiend,Whose mercy is a nickname for the rageOf tameless tigers hungering for blood;Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,Where poisonous and undying worms prolongEternal misery to those hapless slavesWhose life has been a penance for its crimes;Anti Heaven, a meed for those who dare belieTheir human nature, quake, believe and cringeBefore the mockeries of earthly power."
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"content": "The wealth of kings was not merely horrible in itself. It derived from the poverty of others who did the work. In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley wrote:‘The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.‘Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, anti perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind ...’The law, especially the Conspiracy Law, upholds all this, so the law is wrong. ‘The laws which support this system are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many – who are obliged to purchase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort.’Queen Mab, which has been scorned for 150 years, is a marvellous poem for socialists. It is full of hatred for exploitation and exploiters, full of hope and faith in the ability of the exploited to create a new society. How did Shelley, born into the aristocracy and educated at an expensive prep school, at Eton and (briefly) at Oxford come to write it?Partly through intellectual conversion, through reading the radical literature of the French revolutionary era. Shelley’s favourite author at school was the ageing philosopher, Willia`m Godwin. Many of the ideas in Queen Mab, including the idea that all wealth stems from labour, are taken from Godwin’s book Political Justice, which was published in 1793. It cost three guineas. Asked whether the book should be prosecuted for sedition, the Prime Minister, Pitt, replied: ‘No book can be seditious at three guineas!Many of the ideas in Political Justice are revolutionary for their time, but Godwin was always careful to insist that any change in society could only come through men and women individually believing in it.He believed in co-operative ownership in the abstract, on the blackboard. He was particularly keen to discourage any association of men and women who thought as he did. Godwin is the idol of latter-day liberals and anarchists, who think about a new, co-operative society, and do nothing to promote it.Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. Wherever he lived – in Keswick, Cumberland, in Dublin, in North Devon and on the reservoir in Wales, he moved continuously among the working people, talking to them, learning from their experience and their aspirations. Richard Holmes tells how, in Wales, he would walk out at night and engage in long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to stay alive. In Dublin in 1812, he spent much of his time talking to the workers.After a few weeks in Dublin, he wrote Proposals For An Association, in which he argued for a political party devoted to catholic emancipation. When William Godwin read the pamphlet, he almost had a fit. He wrote at once to Shelley, ordering him to forget these notions, to beware of violence, to sit back and ‘calmly to await the progress of truth’.When Shelley wrote back politely refusing to wind up his association, Godwin replied, hysterically: ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’There is a passage in Queen Mab which shows what Shelley felt about armchair revolutionaries. This is perhaps the only passage in the poem which does not take the lead from Godwin. Indeed, it is partly a satire of Godwin.The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,To deeds of charitable intercourseAnd bare fulfilment of the common lawsOf decency and prejudice, confinesThe struggling nature of his human heart,Is duped by their cold sophistry; he shedsA passing tear purchance upon the wreckOf earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s doorThe frightful waves are driven – when his sonIs murdered by the tyrant, or religionDrives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,Whose life is misery, and fear and care;Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toilWho ever hears his famished offspring scream;Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gazeFor ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eyeFlashing command, and the heartbreaking sceneOf thousands like himself: – he little heedsThe rhetoric of tyranny. His hateIs quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scornThe vain and bitter mockery of words,Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,And unrestrained but by the arm of power,That knows and dreads his enmity.Shelley did not get that from reading Godwin – or from any other books for that matter. He got it from the workers and the starving peasantry of Cumberland, Dublin, Wales and Devon. It is this belief in the unshakeable resolve of the exploited masses which makes Shelley’s political writing far more powerful than anything written by Godwin. Yet the argument with Godwin persists, at different levels, through all Shelley’s political writing. On the one hand there is the understanding tat the engine of tyranny is exploitation; on the other, the fear, deeply-rooted in his class background, that the masses in revolt would generate violence and plunder; and that therefore the best way to proceed was by gradual reform.It is idle to pretend, like Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx did in their lecture [2] to the Shelley Society in 1885, that Shelley was the perfect scientific socialist."
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"content": "There is a lot in Shelley’s political writing, if taken out of contcxt, which puts him to the right of many other radical thinkers of the time. In 1817, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet A Proposal For Putting Reform to a Vote, in which he argued against universal suffrage. In his larger work, A Philosophical View of Reform, he argued again against the suffrage on the grounds that it would deliver up too much too soon:‘A Republic, however just in its principle, and glorious in its object, would through the violence and sudden change which must attend it, incur a great risk of being as rapid in its decline as in its growth ...‘It is better that the people should be instructed in the whole truth; that they should see the clear grounds of their rights; the objects to which they ought to tend; and be impressed with the just persuasion that patience and reason and endurance are the means of a calm yet irresistible progress.This led to his advice to the masses to rely on passive disobedience when the army attacked them; and to resurrect ‘old laws’ to ensure their liberties.Yet, often even in the same works, Shelley s longing for revolutionary change clashes openly with this condescending caution. Again and again, he calls openly for direct challenges to the law (especially to the law of criminal libel) and for ‘the oppressed to take furious vengeance on the oppressors.’ (Letter in 1812).All politics in those years were dominated by the French Revolution. Like many other great poets of his time – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – Shelley was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution. One by one, however, the others abandoned the revolution, and denounced it. Shelley was appalled by the Napoleonic dictatorship – and wrote a poem on Napoleon’s death which started: ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant’. But he never lost his enthusiasm for the ideas which had given rise to the revolution. His long poem, the Revolt of Islam, though it contains irritatingly few specific ideas about revolutionary politics, is clear on one matter above all else: that in spite of the disease, the terror, the dictatorship, the wars, the poverty and the ruin which followed the revolution the ideas of reason and progress which inspired it will triumph once again. In his preface to the poem he poured scorn on those who gave up their belief in revolutionary ideas because the revolution had been defeated, or had not gone according to plan. The passage could just as well have been written about the generations of disillusioned Communists after the losing of the Russian revolution:‘On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging front their trance ... In that belief I have composed the following poem.’And so, even after the most frightful catalogue of post-revolutionary tyranny, torture, famine, and disease, the Revolt of Islam remembers the ideas which started the revolution –‘And, slowly, shall in memory ever burningFill this dark night of things with an eternal morning.’ Alone of all the poets of his time, Shelley suppresses his own apprehensions about the French revolution and concentrated instead on the coming triumph of the ideas which had unleashed it.Soon after the Revolt of Islam was published, Shelley heft England for Itahly, where he spent the last four years of his life. All this time he was absorbed by political developments in Britain. In March 1819 he wrote his greatest poem, Prometheus Unbound, which the latter-day ‘lyricists’ hail as a ‘classical tragic drama’, but which is, in fact, a poem about the English Revolution.The Greek legend of Prometheus was taught to us budding Greek scholars (as I behieve it is still taught today) as a moral tale about what happens to subversives when they dare to challenge the authority of God (or the headmaster, or the managing director). Prometheus dared to steal fire from the sun and to bring the benefits of science to mankind. This was intolerable to the King of the Gods, Jupiter, for whom science was something from which only he (and other Gods) should benefit.So Prometheus was chained to a rock, tormented by the daily visits of a vulture who gnawed his liver.To Shelley, Prometheus was a hero, representing the potential of man in revolt against repression.His poem starts with a description of Prometheus’ torture against a background of darkness, disease and tyranny. Asia, Prometheus’ wlfe, determines to release hirn and to overthrow Jupiter. She knows tat there is only one power capable of doing that: the power of Demogorgon, the People-Monster. She and her sister visit Demogorgon in his darkened cave, where she whips and lashes him with argument. Like all good agitators, she starts with the easy questions, playing an popular superstition and servility in order to challenge them.Asia: Who made the living world?Demogorgon: God.Asia: Who made allThat it contains? Thought, passion, reason, willImagination?Demogorgon: God, almighty God.After a bit more of this, her tone switches:Asia: And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,Which from the links of the great chain of things"
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"content": "To every thought within the mind of manSway and drag heavily – and each one restsUnder the load toward the pit of death:Abandoned hope – and love that turns to hate;And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;Pain whose unheeding and familiar speechls bowling and keen shrieks day after day;And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?Demogorgon: He reigns.Asia: Utter his name! A world, pining in pain,Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down!At the end of a long speech and some more furious questions, Asia calls on Demogorgon to arise, unshackle Prometheus and overturn Jupiter. In a sudden climax, he rises. Two chariots appear from the recesses of the cave. Richard Holmes explains what they represent:‘There are two chariots: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which ruins cities ...‘Yet there is a second chariot, with its “delicate strange tracery” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope”. This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’ curse.‘The end of Act II leaves both these possibilities open, historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends an man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case, it is inevitable and it is to be celebrated.’This is the crux of Shelley’s revolutionary ideas, For all his caution when writing about universal suffrage or other reforms, he was an instinctive revolutionary. Perhaps the revolution will come slowly, peacefully, gradually – in gentleness and light. Or perhaps (more probably) it will come with violence and civil war. In either case it is to be celebrated. As Mary Shelley put it in an uncharacteristic flash of insight into her husband’s politics:‘Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.’As the news came through from England, so Shelley’s poetry during the year of repression – 1819 – became more and more openly political. Some poems were what he called ‘hate-songs’, shouts of rage and contempt for the men who ran the English government. There are the Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration, which appeals to the Foreign Secretary:‘Ay, Marry thy Ghastly WifeLet Fear and Disquiet and StrifeSpread thy couch in the chamber of life!Marry Ruin Thou Tyrant! and Hell be Thy GuideTo the Bed of thy Bride.Or the Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819:‘Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,Two scorpions under one wet stone.Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,Two crows perched an the murrained cattle,Two vipers tangled into one.’The sonnet England in 1819 starts with the line:‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.’There is even a parody of the national anthem! In August came the event which was to haunt Shelley for the rest of his life. More than a hundred thousand trade unionists and their families gathered in St Peters Field near Manchester for a great carnival and meeting at which the main speaker was ‘Orator Hunt’, the reformer. The meeting was banned by the Manchester magistrates. On their instruction the yeomanry charged into the crowd hacking with their sabres. Eleven people were killed, and more than 400 injured. One of the dead was a small child which was cut down from its mother s arms.As soon as Shelley heard the news – he was living near Leghorn – he shut himself up in his attic for several days and wrote The Masque of Anarchy, rightly described by Richard Holmes as ‘the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English’. It starts with a dreadful pageant in which the Tory Ministers Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth, dressed respectively as Murder, Fraud and Hypocrisy, ride by, slaughtering ‘the adoring multitude’ as they go.Shelley parts company with the other poets of his age and since who have pretended to favour ‘freedom’ and other fine words, as long as they remain words. He gives a simple definition of freedom.‘What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slavesAnswer from their living gravesThis demand, tyrants would fleeLike a dream’s dim imagery.Thou art not, as imposters say,A shadow soon to pass awayA superstition and a nameEchoing from the cave of fame.For the labourer thou art bread,And a comely table spreadFrom his daily labour comeTo a neat and happy home.Thou art clothes and fire and food,For the trampled multitudeNo – in countries that are freeSuch starvation cannot beAs in England now we see.’The horror of Peterloo – as the massacre came to be known – hangs over many of Shelley’s later poems. In December 1819, he finished Peter Bell The Third, a satire on Wordsworth. The poem shows how Peter was slowly seduced from his revolutionary ideas by the pressures of society, until he was writing drivel like any old Bernard Levin in the Times:‘For he now raved enormous follyOf baptisms, Sunday schools and graves’Twould make George Colman melancholyTo have heard him, like a male Molly,Cbaunting those stupid staves.Yet the Reviews, which heaped abuseOn Peter while he wrote for freedomAs soon as in his song they spy,The folly that spells tyrannyPraise him, for those who feed ’em.Then Peter wrote Odes to cbs DevilIn one of which he meekly saidMay Carnage and SlaughterThy niece anti thy daughterMay Rapine and famineThy gorge ever crammingGlut thee with living and dead!May death and damnationAnd consternationFlit up fröm heaven with pure intent.Slash them at ManchesterGlasgow, Leeds and CbesterDrench all with blood front Avon to Trent!’The same savage satire is directed against the Tory government in Swellfoot The Tyrant, a joke play in which the king and his ministers are hunted down by their pig-people. "
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"content": "Shelley’s censors have done their best to suppress all these poems. In the standard anthologies there is no Masque of Anarchy, no Peter Bell, no Swellfoot, no Men of England, none of the shorter political poems of 1819. To compensate for this awful void, the biographers and Shelley-lovers concocted another myth: that the most powerful influence on Shelley was an ethereal, almost divine quality called ‘love’. Extracts were hacked out of context to prove that Shelley was guided by the ‘love’ which every brave Victorian gentleman felt for his passive, obsequious and domestic wife.But ‘love’, Shelley wrote in the notes to Queen Mab, ‘withers under constraint. Its very essence is liberty. It is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy or fear. It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.’For Sbelley love was bound up with the battle for women’s rights, in which he was even more dedicated a crusader than his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. In all his, revolutionary poems, the revolutionary leaders are women: Cyntha in the Revolt of Islam; Asia in the Prometheus; Queen Mab, Iona in Swellfoot. All are champions not only of the common people, but also of the rights of their sex:‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless airTo the corruption of a closed grave?Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bearScorn heavier far than toil or anguish dareTo trample their oppressors? In their home,Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wearThe shape of woman – hoary crime would comeBehind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome.’It followed that chastity and marriage were a lot of nonsense.‘Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery ... A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.Prostitution was ‘the legitimate offspring of marriage’: Shelley, was no prude. There is a thumping organ in Alastor – and another, more prolonged ‘deep and speechless swoon of joy’ in the Revolt of Islam – to prove it. But he had nothing but contempt for ‘unintellectual sensuality’, for ‘annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. He was for love, sex, women’s liberation; against chastity, prostitution, promiscuity.Needless to say, these ideas goaded Shelley’s Christian contemporaries to paroxysms of indignation. The same ruling class pretended to deplore the morals of Lord Byron and his harem in Venice. In fact, Byron’s orgies were the source of almost uninterrupted titivation at coming-out-balls; they helped to make an enormous fortune out of Byron’s poems. High society worshipped marriage, subsidised prostitution and tolerated promiscuity. Free love of the type which Shelley advocated ‘undermined the fabric of their national life’ and was on no account to be mentioned, let alone published.All these ideas grew stronger in Shelley as he got older. Stephen Spender in an essay which he wrote in 1953, as he prepared to abandon a dessicated Stalinism for a respectable literary career, wrote that Shelley ‘abandoned his radical ideas’ shortly before his death. This is nonsense. Karl Marx, who enjoyed Shelley almost as much as Shakespeare, understood it better. He wrote:The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice tbat Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois. They grieve that Sbelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.He was in the advanced guard of socialism for long after his death. All through the great agitations of the last century, through the battle to repeal the Combination Laws, through Chartism, through the early socialist activity of the 1880s and 1890s hundreds of thousands of workers took courage and confidence from Shelley. The reason is not just because Shelley was an instinctive rebel who hated exploitation; but because he combined his revolutionary ideas in poetry.What is the point of poetry? Is it not namby-pamby stuff, the plaything of middle-class education? Certainly, our education would like to reduce poetry to doggerel about trees and clouds and birds which you have to recite in front of teacher and then forget as soon as possible.That is one of the reasons why generation after generation of text-book editors have limited the ‘great poets’ to meaningless meandering through glades. But poetry has another purpose, very dangerous to our educators. As Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry:‘The most unfailing herald, companion .and follower of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods as this, there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature ...’Why? Because great poems, like great songs, which are only poems set to music, art easily learnt and remembered. The words linger in the memory over generations. And if the words carry revolutionary ideas, those ideas are communicated in poems far more thoroughly than in prose, in conversation or even in slogans.We socialists have great difficulty in communication. However much we know and understand the political solutions to our social problems, the knowledge and understanding is useless unless we can communicate them. Trade union officialdom has constructed for itself a language of its own, a constipated gobbledegook, which protects it not so much from smooth-tongued employers as from its own rank and file. In the same way, many revolutionary socialists, after years of propaganda in the wilderness, have spun themselves a cocoon in which they and other sectarians can snuggle, safe from the oblivious outside world. Inside the cocoon, there is another language, a hideous, bastard language, unintelligible to the masses."
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"content": "In the same way as the Russians insulted Lenin’s ideas on religion by mummifying his body, so these latter-day Trotskyists insult the clarity and power of Trotsky’s language by mummifying out-of-character and out-of-context sectarian phraseology. As a result, they communicate with nobody but themselves; argue with nobody but themselves; damage nobody but themselves.We can enrich our language and our ability to communicate by reading great revolutionary poetry like that of Shelley.All his life, Shelley was persecuted by the problem of communication. He was not, as his worshippers in later decades pretended, a ‘lyric’ poet interested only in writing beautiful poetry. He was a man with revolutionary ideas, and he wanted to transmit them. His Ode to the West Wind was not a paean of praise to a wonder of nature, but a desperate appeal to the wind to:‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universeLike withered leaves to quicken a new birthAnd, by the incantation of this verseScatter, as from an unextinguished hearthAshes and sparks, my words to all mankind.Be through my lips to unawakened earthThe trumpet of a prophecy!’Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time.That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude:‘And these words shall then becomeLike oppression’s thundered doomRinging through each heart and brainHeard again, again, againRise like lions after slumberIn unvanquishable numberShake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on you.Ye are many. They are few.’ Notes1. Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.2. Shelley’s Socialism, by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling – just reprinted by the Journeyman Press, 60p. Top of the pageLast updated on 19.3.2012"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBlair: our brotherour friend(16 June 1979)From Socialist Worker, 16 June 1979.Reprinted in Nick Grant and Brian Richardson, Blair Peach: Socialist and Anti-Racist (London: Socialist Workers’ Party, 2014), pp. 43–44.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.From Manchester to Tolpuddle the martyrs of our movement have been humble people. They neither sought the limelight nor found it. They were unknown except to a close circle of friends and family. They became famous not because of their ambitions nor their vanity, but because of their deaths.Such was a man called Alfred Linnell. No one knows very much about him. He earned a pittance by copying out legal documents. On 21 November 1887 he went down to Trafalgar Square to join the fighters for free speech in the week after Bloody Sunday, when a great demonstration had been broken up by police truncheons.While he was standing, unarmed, and unsuspecting, by the side of the crowd, a posse of police, who had orders to keep Trafalgar Square free of demonstrators “by whatever force was necessary”, charged straight into him, breaking his neck with the horses’ hooves.The police openly despised the people they were charging. They saw them, as the Times leader put it on the day after Bloody Sunday, as “all that is weakest, most worthless and most vicious in the slums of a great city”. These were the “sweepings”, which deserved only to be swept.But the poor of London flocked to commemorate Alfred Linnell. Tens of thousands of socialists, Irish republicans, radicals, feminists and working people of no party and no persuasion joined in what Edward Thompson described as “the greatest united demonstration which London had seen”. The streets were lined all the way to Bow cemetery with crowds of sympathetic onlookers. The few rather shamefaced policeman who dared to appear were greeted with cries of: “That’s your work”. Very, very few of that crowd knew Alfred Linnell. Yet they hailed him, in the words of William Morris at Linnell’s funeral, as “our brother and our friend”.He was a representative of the tens of thousands who had nothing, and when they took to the streets to demand something were ridden down and battered by the forces of law and order.That was nearly 100 years ago and can easily be dismissed as “the sort of thing which happened in the bad old days”. The killing of Blair Peach proves that the same things are still going on today. He was attacked at a demonstration by policeman who, as at Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, were licensed to clear the streets by brutality and violence.In Southall, as in Trafalgar Square 100 years ago, the police were driven on by a contempt for the demonstrators – “black scum” as one mounted officer so politely put it. No doubt the savagery of the blow which ended Blair Peach’s life was prompted at least in part by the fact that his skin was dusky. And Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, has been hailed as brother and friend by thousands of working men and women who did not know him.On 28 April 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in his memory. They stood with clenched fists over the place where he was murdered. And they chanted a single triumphant slogan – “Blair Peach zindabad – long live Blair Peach”It was perhaps the greatest demonstration of solidarity between people of different colours but with similar interests and similar purpose that the town had ever seen. Why? Because Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, is a representative of all the people all over Britain who see in the strutting perverts of the National Front the broken bodies of black people battered in the street; who can detect further off but no less horrible the awful spectre of fascism looming over all society, and who stand up and say No.To me and all members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Blair Peach means even more than that. I never knew him personally. But I knew him as one of the party members who kept socialist organisation alive and well during the worst times. They know how to sustain the Anti Nazi League in an area where two or three delegates turn up to a meeting to which 20 had promised to come.They have endless patience and endurance. They try to excite others into political activity without straining too hard at their patience and endurance. They seem to be at all the meetings and all the demonstrations. They are not in the front when the press cameras are clicking but they are in the front line when the SPG wade in with their coshes. In the last three years – the period by the way in which Blair Peach joined the Socialist Workers Party – these people have been strained to breaking point as more and more of the burden of the organisation of the left has fallen upon them. Blair Peach was killed in the process and that above all is why we honour him.We march at his funeral not just in sympathy with the people who loved him, nor just out of respect for all he did for us but in anger. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 September 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootParliamentary privilege(November 1994)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 180, November 1994, p. 4.Copyright © 1994 Socialist ReviewDownloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.It couldn’t have happened to a nastier minister. No MP more persistently and offensively represents the true spirit of Thatcherism than Neil Hamilton, the Minister for Corporate Affairs. Hamilton first came to public notice when he attended the 1973 conference of the Italian Fascist Party, MSI, as an observer from the Young Conservatives.Since he was elected Tory MP for Tatton in 1983, he has rested the extreme Thatcherite right, constantly baiting true unionists, the unemployed and the dispossessed. He flaunts the sterile wit and pervasive arrogance of all the Thatcherite Young Turks who grew rich and famous at the expense of others in the Golden Years of Private Enterprise. Hamilton denies being paid £2,000 a time to ask questions, but he does not deny a sumptuous weekend in Paris at the expense of the ghastly old liar and cheat Fayed, the chairman of Harrods. Dinner each night for the MP and his wife cost the Harrods boss £232. How that figure must have delighted ‘scroungers’ in bed: breakfast accommodation so often mocked by Hamilton and his ilk.The media have discovered something they call ‘parliamentary sleaze’. Yet this is one the most time honoured institutions of our mother of parliaments. Many and varied are the ways in which corporate power in capitalist society cuts down all semblance of representative democracy in parliaments and local councils, but the most obvious of them all is buying the representatives. If MPs are paid more by an ‘outside interest’ than by their constituents, then it follows that they will consider the interests of the corporation before those of their constituents. The MP for Loamshire (£31,000 a year) prefers to be the MP for Blue Blooded Merchant Bank plc (£50,000 a year and rising). Representation plays second fiddle to corporate public relations.Before 1975 MPs didn’t even have to declare which firms paid them. The Poulson scandal of the late 1960s and 1970s revealed a clutch of MPs using questions, motions, dining rooms and debates to promote the interests of the corrupt architect. One MP had to resign, and the Register of Interests was set up. No one took much notice of it, even during the 1980s as the number of consultancies, directorships and perks showered on MPs, almost all of them Tory, rose to obscene levels. One Tory MP was so bemused by the way in which his colleagues were growing rich that he actually advertised for a company to take him on as a consultant. The private dining rooms of the House of Commons – why are there private dining rooms there anyway? – became a huge commercial undertaking whereby corporations offered their customers the best food and drink, all consumed in an intoxicating atmosphere of democracy. How wonderful to drink a toast to the hierarchs of the Hanson Trust after a glamorous dinner in the ancient seat of parliament!By the mid-1980s the buying of MPs had become a public and obvious scandal. No one noticed. On and on it went, with the blessing of both prime ministers. Thatcher and Major both used 10 Downing Street as another watering hole to pour booze down the gullets of generous donors to the Tory Party:If parliament was indeed composed of representatives there should be no ‘outside interests’ whatsoever, MPs should, get their salary and not a penny more. Their perks and trips abroad should be ruthlessly wiped out, and their activities subjected to the most rigorous public scrutiny and disclosure. That is what the new House of Commons Privileges Committee should recommend. But since the committee consists of seven Tory MPs, all with business interests, sitting in secret, the chances of even the mildest restrictions on rampant sleaze are spectacularly low. Top of the pageLast updated on 25 April"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPortrait of an Appalling Man(February 1974)From International Socialism (1st series), No.66, February 1974, pp.27-28.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a PoliticianBernard Donoughue and G.W. JonesWeidenfeld & Nicholson, £6.00.HERBERT MORRISON was appalling. In his youth he flirted with Marxist ideas and organisations until one day he went to listen to Ramsay Macdonald. From that day, Morrison modelled himself on ‘the old man’, and took up Macdonald’s stance on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. As leader of the first Labour-controlled London County Council from 1934; as Home Secretary during the war and as overlord of the Labour government’s post-war home policy he never abandoned his passionate hatred of communism or of independent working class activity.When in the early 1920s, the Labour-controlled Poplar borough council paid its unemployed more than the pitiful rates allowed by law and paid its workers more than the rate negotiated by collective bargaining machinery, Morrison, then secretary of the London Labour Party, denounced the Poplar Councillors: ‘No electorate,’ he argued, ‘could trust local authorities which spent ratepayers’ money so recklessly.’Any direct action by workers or their representatives horrified Herbert Morrison. ‘He rather scorned strikes’, write his biographers. After the collapse of the General Strike in 1926, he gleefully rubbed home the lessons to his supporters.‘A general strike,’ he argued, ‘must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress... nobody with half a brain believes that in Britain such a policy could be successful.’The alternative to all this direct action nonsense. Morrison argued, was to build up the Labour Party and get hold of parliamentary office.Parliamentary office gave him what he needed to carry out his concept of ‘socialism’ - a well-ordered, well-regulated state capitalist society in which Morrison would be chief orderer and chief regulator. He was the bureaucrat par excellence. Or, as Beatrice Webb put it in her diaries, ‘Herbert Morrison is the quintessence of Fabianism.’ Give him the machinery of government, the blue books, the statistics, the loyal civil servants, the insignia of office and Morrison was in his element. Socialist society, he believed, would be built by a handful of able and enlightened bureaucrats in Whitehall.‘Public ownership’ to Morrison meant control by bureaucrats selected ‘on their ability’ by the minister. When he was minister of transport in 1930, he refused to appoint workers’ representatives to the board of his new London Transport undertaking. He wanted the undertaking to be run exclusively by ‘men of a business turn of mind’ which, he explained graciously, ‘might include such people as trade union bodies as well as men of business experience in the ordinary sense of the word’. These included Lord Ashfield, the tycoon who owned the main private London transport companies before Morrison’s 1930 Bill.‘Morrison,’ writes Mr Jones, ‘came to admire Ashfield and had him in mind to be the chairman of the new board. To nationalise Lord Ashfield was his objective.’ Lord Ashfield was thoroughly sympathetic. ‘He became a devotee of the public corporation,’ and did a lot to persuade Liberals and Tories in the House of Commons that ‘Morrisonisation’, as it came to be known, was really a more efficient form of running capitalism.This relationship with big business was taken up even more enthusiastically when Morrison took charge of Labour’s economic policies after the war. ‘Morrison liked dealing with tycoons,’ writes Mr Bernard Donoughue, his other biographer, ‘and in general they liked him, as Chandos said, “because you got down to brass tacks with him”.’When the Morrisonisation of steel was proposed by the majority in the Labour Cabinet in 1947, Morrison discovered to his horror that the steelmasters were against it. The coalowners and the railway bosses had, after a few statutory grumbles, conceded the Morrisonisation of coal and rail transport. But Sir Andrew Duncan, the steel industry leader and a favourite tycoon of Morrison’s, did not want steel Morrisonised. Morrison promptly sabotaged the Cabinet’s plans by working out new proposals, in secret, with Sir Andrew. The majority of the Cabinet, prompted by Aneurin Bevan, finally forced through steel nationalisation against Morrison’s wishes, but Morrison’s sabotage ensured that steel was not nationalised until the end of the Labour government’s term of office. This left Sir Andrew and his friends much more time to mobilise.Morrison was one of the fiercest anti-communist witch-hunters in British history. He carried out a ruthless and permanent campaign against communists of every description. But his hatred of communists in Britain did not extend to Russia. As Mr Jones writes:‘He found little similarity between the attitudes of Russian communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The former appeared cautious, believing in gradual development; they did not accept workers’ control.’When Morrison was Home Secretary in January 1941 he proposed that the Daily Worker, the organ of the British Communist Party, which was then advocating a ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line on the war, should be banned by government decree. The Tory-dominated Cabinet agreed. Writing about the incident in his autobiography, Morrison commented: ‘Not unexpectedly there was no protest from Russia about the closing down of the Daily Worker. The Soviet Union admires bold and firm action.’ One state capitalist censor could quickly detect another.Morrison was a social imperialist of the old Jimmy Thomas school. Visiting New York in 1946, he proclaimed: ‘We are friends of the jolly old Empire. We are going to stick to it ...’ He added, for good measure, ‘The monarchy is a real factor among cementing influences between Britain and the Commonwealth. The monarchy is a great institution.’Morrison was also, by the same token, a passionate Zionist. ‘In Israel,’ he wrote in The Times in 1950, ‘the spirit of human service exists more sincerely and more in practice than in any other part of the civilised world and we are glad it has a Labour government.’"
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"content": "This devotion to a civilised democratic society extended to Ireland, where Morrison was a passionate supporter of the Orange cause. In July 1943, as Home Secretary, he addressed a meeting of the 30 Club where the crusted Orange monster, Sir Basil Brooke (later Lord Brookeborough) was the guest of honour.Morrison praised the loyalty of Ulster as ‘almost aggressive in its nature’. ‘After the war,’ writes Mr Donoughue, ‘he continued to keep a protective eye on Ulster’s interests in the Labour Cabinet.’ An elected Parliament was at stake, after all, so why should a man like Morrison care about a million evicted Palestinians, or half a million oppressed Catholics?In his private life, Morrison emerges from the book almost as hideous as he was in public. He was greedily ambitious, arrogant, sentimental, male chauvinist, mean. And a hypocrite to the end. ‘Several times,’ he told the Daily Mail on 22 June, 1959, ‘I could have accepted a viscountcy, but all my life I’ve been of the working class and that’s how I’d like to stay.’ Three months later, on 19 September, the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced the appointment of Lord Morrison of Lambeth.All this makes unpromising material for hero-worship, but Mr Jones and Mr Donoughue, lecturers at the London School of Economics, do their best to idolise Morrison. Endless senior civil servants are wheeled out to prove that Morrison was the ‘ablest’ minister they ever dealt with (is it only an impression, or is it the case that all senior civil servants take the view that any minister about whom they happen to be interviewed was the ‘ablest they ever dealt with’?). We are left to marvel at Morrison’s ‘mastery of detail’, his ‘ability to command an argument’, his ‘organisational genius’.For the authors, politics takes place within the square mile which includes the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, all the ministries, and the London School of Economics. Not for them the tumultuous developments outside. Hardly a mention in the book of the great social upheavals which shook the period about which they write, no explanation of the downfall of the Macdonald government; wartime socialist revival; of post-war slumplessness. Politics for them is how ministers behave and respond, and Morrison suits them admirably. The only time Mr Donoughue seems to get upset with Morrison is when the latter offends the Foreign Office mandarins with his brusque manner. ‘He handled ambassadors in a casual and offhand way’ scolds Mr Donoughue. ‘He often received them – and kept them waiting – in his room at the House of Commons leaving the unfortunate but not misleading impression that his prime loyalty and interest lay there rather than with the Office.’ Egad, Sir, What next?If this was just an enormous book by two precise dons about a right-wing Labour leader, that would be the end of the story. But it is not. The account of Morrison’s life is so comprehensible that, almost by accident, it tells us a thing or two about British social democracy.Herbert Morrison represents, perhaps more than anyone else, British social democracy in its heyday. His political life was dominated by the belief that a better life for the dispossessed could be created by the election of Labour governments and councils.Substantial changes were made to the workers’ advantage under Herbert Morrison-especially in London. Patients in LCC hospitals were much better off under Labour; the blind and mentally ill got a much better deal; schools were improved; classes were smaller, teachers better paid; ‘a great change came over the LCC parks’ - more baths were built; more swimming pools, gymnasia, refreshment places, paddling pools, athletic grounds, bowling greens. The briefest comparison between facilities of this kind for workers in London compared with, say, New York, measures the advances of social democracy under Morrison in London.Similarly, the post-war Labour government did force through a Health Service in opposition to the Tories and the doctors; it did nationalise the mines and the railways (leading to better working conditions for the workers in both industries), it did wipe out the old Poor Laws, and establish a new system of industrial injuries compensation. It solved none of the contradictions of capitalism; it left capitalism stronger in 1951 than it had been in 1945. But a wide variety of reforms in a wide variety of areas were carried out by Herbert Morrison and his colleagues.Above all, these reforms, and the hope of much more where they came from connected the Labour Party to the working class. Morrison understood better than any Labour leader does today that his brand of social democracy can only survive as long as it sustained the active interest of large numbers of workers. Morrison never stopped writing Labour Party propaganda. The number of leaflets, pamphlets, brochures which he organised, wrote and distributed from London Labour Party headquarters all the year round was prodigious. He put a premium on individual membership of ordinary workers in the Labour Parties. He organised choirs, dramatic societies, almost anything to sustain and excite the London Labour Party membership.Above all, he realised the danger to his political aspirations of corruption. All his life he fought relentlessly against corruption in the Labour Party, especially in local government. LCC councillors during Morrison’s rule were subjected to the strictest discipline as to their relations with officials or contractors. Morrison himself never accepted any job with private enterprise, though he was offered literally hundreds."
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"content": "Throughout Morrison’s life, the results were obvious. In the 1930s, and, especially, in the 1940s, the British working class did respond, not just with votes, but with interest and involvement Herbert Morrison could not speak anywhere without attracting hundreds, often thousands of people. Any post-war meeting he addressed in South London was attended by an inevitable 1500. The crowds who came to hear him were almost incredible. During the 1950 General Election, he travelled to Yarmouth to speak to a mass rally of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, whose cause he had always espoused. A hundred thousand farm workers poured into Yarmouth from all over East Anglia to hear Herbert Morrison. A hundred thousand! Imagine a visit by today’s Labour deputy, Ted Short, to Yarmouth at election time to speak on the subject of farm workers. Short would be lucky to attract 10 farm workers to his meeting.There is a vast gulf between the strength of social democracy in Herbert Morrison’s time and social democracy today. The gulf is not in aspirations. Judging by resolutions at Labour Party conferences, the Party’s aspirations last year at Blackpool (or the year before at Brighton) were just as grandiose as anything Herbert Morrison ever thought up. Indeed Morrison would have been shocked at the ‘shopping list’ of nationalisation proposals drawn up at those conferences.Rather, the gap is in the connection between the aspirations of Labour politicians and the involvement of their rank and file. No amount of nationalisation resolutions at conference can mask the breathtaking apathy of Labour’s dwindling rank and file.The constituency parties have been abandoned to hacks and careerists, and the MPs and councillors have no one to answer to. As a result, the entire Party has become infected with corruption. There is hardly a Labour MP who does not hold some ‘watching brief or ‘interest’ in industry or public relations to supplement his already vast annual salary; hardly a Labour council in the country free from the attention of rogues and speculators in private enterprise. The corruption is tolerated on a wide scale. One of the few MPs who has tried to clean his Labour Party up - Eddie Milne of Blyth (former seat of Lord Robens) - is being hounded out of his candidature. The process works both ways. Corruption grows because the rank and file either does not exist or does not ask questions. And the rank and file is increasingly sickened by the stench of corruption.It is no good yearning, as Mr Jones tends to do, for the ‘good old days’ when Labour politicians like Herbert Morrison meant something to people, when Labour corruption was the exception, not the rule. The deterioration of social democracy has its roots in the politics of Herbert Morrison, and those like him. If what matters above all is the vote – if the vote paves the path to workers’ power, it follows that the most important contribution of workers to Labour is their vote. All other forms of labour mobilisation - strikes, demonstrations, agitation, education, organisation - inevitably become an embarrassment. Any Gallup Poll will show that all these things are ‘unpopular’. If the votes are to come to Labour, Labour must oppose strikes. It must not make socialist propaganda. It must not organise at the place of work.When all these forms of mobilisation are systematically abandoned, as they have been by the Labour Party, there is nothing else to which workers can respond. There are no pamphlets, very few leaflets, no socialist propaganda, no factory organisation, no local organisation outside vote-collecting, no youth movement worthy of the name – nothing to do to help create a new society save vote for the next hack who comes along. The demobilisation of rank and file members is death to the Labour Party, but that demobilisation is an essential part of a political strategy whose central aim is to shift capitalist society through parliamentary endeavour.Social democracy, in short, is its own grave-digger, and the pit is now deep and black. It is worth dwelling at length on the careers of illusionists like Herbert Morrison if only to harden our resolve to build socialism on the rocks of workplace organisation and direct action which Morrison so detested. Top of the pageLast updated on 8.3.2008"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootVictor Gollancz: From Marx to muddle(October 1987)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 102, October 1987.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Victor GollanczRuth Dudley EdwardsGollancz, £20.00THE FIRST big public meeting I spoke to was on behalf of the Liberal Party: at an eve-of-poll meeting for Derek Monsey, Liberal candidate in Westminster in the 1959 General Election. When I arrived, very nervous, at the hall, everyone was very excited. “We’ve got a surprise speaker” I was told, “Victor Gollancz.” I was very impressed, though I had never heard of Victor Gollancz.At the end of the meeting a rather kindly old man got up and said he had supported the Labour Party all his life, but now he thought the most important issue in the world was nuclear weapons. As Derek Monsey was the only candidate in Westminster who supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the old man declared his intention to vote Liberal.There was loud applause from the audience, most of whom were implacably opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament (as was the Liberal Party).At the end of the meeting, I was introduced to the great man. He congratulated me warmly on my speech, and then took me on one side. “I hope you don’t believe any of this nonsense,” he whispered. “You should be a socialist – in fact, I think you will be one.”I was most indignant at the time, but it wasn’t long before the old man’s prediction came true, and I’ve had a sneaking affection for him ever since.The affection grew as I read this comprehensive and enthralling biography. Victor Gollancz never went to parliament. He never taught at university. He had nothing but contempt all his life for the right wing leadership of the Labour Party. Yet he had a profound effect on politics in Britain for at least two decades.His most extraordinary achievement was the Left Book Club, which lasted from 1936 to 1948. In its first ten years, the Club published six million books – a quite staggering figure. At its heyday just before the Second World War, the Club had 57,000 members, each of whom was guaranteed a new book a month. There was also a wide range of old socialist classics, specialist books, scientific books, history books and pamphlets.This enormous output of Club books was augmented, in the run-up to the 1945 election, with the “Yellow back” pamphlets, all directed against the corruption and hopelessness of the Tory years before the war, and each selling about a quarter of a million copies. It is no exaggeration to claim, as Ruth Dudley-Edwards does, that Gollancz, with his commitment and his flair, did a great deal to shift the intellectual climate towards the Labour landslide of 1945.After the war, when Ernie Bevin (“Britain’s Greatest Foreign Secretary” as all important people always call him) was saying, “I try to be fair to the Germans, but I ’ates ’em really”; when various Tories tried to whip up an anti-German fever such as the one which gripped the entire country after the First World War, Gollancz campaigned for an internationalist view.He did not campaign as hard for the nationalisation of German industries (the real issue) as he did for food parcels for the poor. But his campaigning on this issue did a lot to stop anti-German hysteria. Similarly, at the height of the success of Zionism in kicking out the Palestinians and setting up a new state in the Middle East, Gollancz, a Jew and at one time a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, spoke up for the dispossessed Palestinians.So irrepressible was Gollancz’s vigour, so brilliant his intellect and so vast his conceit that it would seem that he could do anything. Indeed, Marx’s famous comment about history is reversed by this biography to read, “Gollancz made his own history and he made it just as he pleased.” But of course he did not. His life, perhaps even more than most, was circumscribed by the social forces with which he wrestled.For instance, the Left Book Club had a membership of 57,000 in 1939, under a Tory government. Six years later, the dream of most Left Book Club members came true: a Labour government was returned with a massive majority. Everyone rejoiced, and almost at once, the influence of the Left Book Club declined. By the end of 1946 there were only 10,000 members, and in 1948 the Club was dissolved without anyone noticing.How could it be that the thirst for socialist ideas and literature should tail off so very fast at the very moment of apparent triumph? The answer is that in social democratic electoral politics, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The expectation and hope of a victory was a far greater inspiration to socialist ideas and agitation than was the reality of Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison.Gollancz could sense the disillusionment all right and he never capitulated to the parliamentary cretinism of his former friends, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps. But instead of using the Marxist method which had inspired him in the 1930s to interpret the postwar disillusionment, he turned against Marx altogether:“The real battle is not between capitalism and more socialism, but between the liberal or Western ethic and the totalitarianism of which the Soviet Union is now the major exponent.”Then he argued that all political ideas should be subordinated to higher values, liberal values, religious values. These new statements of “value” won him praise from Tories who had denounced him in the 1930s and early 1940s.How was it possible that such a lively and well-read socialist who did not simply decay as most old socialists do, should so reverse his opinions? How could a man who in 1929 described Das Kapital as “the fourth most enthralling volume of the world’s literature” recite so soon after the war the familiar reactionary incantations against Marx. Most of the answer, I suspect, lies in the roots of the brand of Marxism which inspired him in the 1930s, and which showed up the grim side of the Left Book Club."
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"content": "In the early years of the Club, Gollancz was completely captive to the Communist Party. He conceded almost everything to them. Twelve of the first 15 of the LBC choices were vetted and approved by the CP (at least ten of those, today, are quite unreadable). The amount of indigestible Stalinist trash turned out in those pink and orange covers was astonishing.Gollancz was one of three “choosers” of the titles. Only one of the others was CP – and even he (Strachey) was not a party member. Yet again and again, even on the simplest issues such as the right to dissent, Gollancz capitulated.It was not simply that Trotsky and everything Trotskyist was not tolerated in the Left Book Club. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was turned down by Gollancz. H.N. Brailsford, one of the first among British socialist writers to appreciate the horrors of the Moscow trials, was one of the authors who suffered worst – both intellectually and financially – from Victor’s stubborn submersion in the CP line.As so often, the party hack or fellow-traveller, when he suddenly becomes aware of his hackery, turns to rend his former mentors, and, in the process, throws the whole ideology out with the bathwater. Gollancz was quick enough to spot the CP’s opportunism over the Hitler-Stalin pact but his indignation led him to reject altogether not just the CP, but all Marxism which he thought they represented.Thus, in a curious way, the Stalinism to which he was converted in the 1930s (he named Stalin as Man of the year 1937) and the social democratic government to which he formally aspired in the 1940s were both disastrous to his political development. Disillusioned with both he turned not to new socialist ideas, but against socialist ideas altogether.I hope I have not put anyone off this book, however. It is far, far more illuminating about the 1930s and 1940s than most of the trivial contemporary stuff on the subject. The character of the man comes through very loud if not very clear. Criticism of him is easy and obvious. But perhaps the most interesting exercise is to compare him and his times with today.In those days of slump and “downturn”, when there was still some life and hope in social democratic politics, they threw up vast, engaging and brilliant personalities who believed they could change the world and acted accordingly. A generation of Labour governments later, there is nothing remotely as impressive as Victor Gollancz anywhere on the Labour stage. Top of the pageLast updated on 7.3.2012"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootIntroduction to In the Heat of the Struggle(September 1993)From In the Heat of the Struggle: 25 Years of Socialist Worker (London: Bookmarks, 1993), pp. 9–12.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.MOST OF the propaganda about a free press in Britain is about as credible as a story from Enid Blyton. Five on a Treasure Island would be an appropriate title for it. Of the 14 million newspapers sold every day in Britain, 92 percent are owned and rigidly controlled by five men. One of these men, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns and controls Sky Television, now directly, without the slightest attention to the views of anyone else, runs a third of the British mass media.The five are in the game for one purpose only: profit. They instinctively support everyone else who produces for profit. The bigger and the richer their friends, the more support they give them in the mass media.Of course everyone in Britain is ‘free’ to produce competitors to these newspapers. Anyone can set up a printing press, hire some writers, and have a stab at creating a mass circulation newspaper capable of competing with the Sun or the Mirror. All you need for this venture – just for a start, that is – is ten million pounds minimum. Then your problems start. The advertising industry, which provides half the revenue for newspapers, and the distribution industry, controlled by two huge monopolies, are also in the hands of the rich, loyal to the rich. The truth is that everyone is as free to set up a newspaper as they are to spend a night in the Ritz. All you need is an enormous amount of money, which only very few people have.It’s impossible to imagine the rich proprietors, rich advertisers and rich distributors will publish newspapers which spread ideas hostile to the rich. If we in the labour movement want a new set of ideas to circulate among workers, we will have to provide, subsidise and circulate our own media. Unless we do so, the rich will have a monopoly in the ideas business even more pernicious that their monopoly of the means of production. The irony is, however, that the labour movement has consistently, throughout the century, abandoned its independent press. The Daily Herald was taken over by the Labour Party in the early 1920s, sold to the TUC a few years later and built into the biggest circulation paper in Britain. In 1958, the TUC sold its stake. The Herald, then selling nearly two million copies a day, closed down in 1964. Murdoch bought its successor in 1969. It is now the Sun. Until recently the Labour Party produced a weekly and monthly paper – Labour Weekly and New Socialist. Now both have vanished. The aspiration of modern Labour has sunk so low that they are happy with the crumbs of spare they are tossed from the high tables of the proprietors.Socialist Worker was born 25 years ago in a tiny room in Tottenham. There were, I think, five of us on the editorial board. The paper was four pages long, and none of us expected it to sell more than 5,000 copies. This is the story of what happened since. It’s not all a success story. The circulation and influence of the paper is still far too small. But there is about everything in this book a single theme, summed up in the three words ‘against the stream’. The hypocrisy and cruelty of the rich, the collaboration of the Labour leaders, the pusillanimity of the trade union leaders – all are exposed here with a single purpose: to build and extend an effective counter-attack. The mood of the paper goes up with the industrial victories of the 1970s and down with the industrial defeats of the 1990s, but its simple, clear commitment to socialism from below steadies it against super-optimism and super-pessimism. It analyses the world all right, but concentrates constantly on the real point: to change it. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 September 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootA socialist bookshelf(July 1983)From Socialist Worker, July 1983.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 235–236.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.You have to look hard for some good news these bleak summer days, but I am cheered by two bits of it last week.The first was that the takings at the bookstalls at Marxism 83, a week-long series of meetings, debates and discussions between Marxists, reached an all-time (and in the circumstances quite extraordinary) high of £9,000. More people came to Marxism this year than in any other, but the proportion of books sold to people who registered was higher, I gather, than ever before.These fantastic sales among people who have not got very much money is further proof, if proof were needed, that socialists as a breed read more than anyone else. The ideas which keep people socialists against all the pressures of society push them more and more towards books.But stop! Is there not some hideous deviation here? Is all this book-buying just a sign of property consciousness?I remember during a day school for Socialist Worker readers in Manchester some ten years ago fleeing during a break to a secondhand bookshop with one of the school’s organizers.As I emerged with a couple of prize possessions, he remonstrated with me. Was this not just covetousness for possessions, a sort of obsession with belongings which had a distinctly bourgeois ring to it?I supposed he was right, and hid the books shamefacedly. But on reflection, I realize he was not right at all. First, there is the old argument about private possessions and public property.As John Strachey argued in his little book Why You Should be a Socialist nearly fifty years ago, the whole point about the public ownership and planning of the means of production is that it releases capital for producing things that people need and want. He argued for more public ownership and more equality not to abolish private possessions but to make them more widely available.Then there is a special argument about books. However marvellous the progress in other forms of media such as tapes and videos, for people who think and who value ideas there is no replacement for books.This is because books do not impose a pace on their reader. They can be studied at the reader’s own level of concentration and consciousness. And then they can be re-read.Of course public libraries are wonderful institutions, and under any system even remotely socialist would be expanded far beyond anything we have at present.But there is a peculiar advantage in owning books, since they can be marked, stored away in shelves and in the mind, and returned to again and again when a new idea or argument comes along.In an old questionnaire among Communists in Fife, the third or fourth question was: ‘Are there any books in the house?’ Plenty of workers, usually the best Communists, answered ‘Yes’.And that brings me to the second piece of good news. Last January I was driven from Harwich to Felixstowe by Dave Saunders, a seaman on a North Sea car ferry.We were talking then about the collision of two ferries, which had killed six workers in dreadful circumstances.As we came back to Harwich, Dave suddenly changed the subject and started talking about Shelley. As we went into his house, I fell eagerly on a big bookcase, full of old books of every description: Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley.Last week I was up that way again, for a meeting in Ipswich, led off with great vigour by Dave Saunders.He was speaking for the workers on the ferries who had gone on strike against a crude attempt of the owners to sabotage their nationally agreed wage rise.I was delighted to see that those workers won their fight (as far as I can see game, set and match). And I certainly believe that Dave Saunders’s bookcase had something to do with it. Top of the pageLast updated on 5 October 2019"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootIrelandMajority rule(January 1997)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.204, January 1997, p.7.Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.John Major, who used to believe that his single handed achievement of peace in Ireland would bring him political immortality, has discovered a far more important objective: staying in office. The arithmetic of the British parliament leaves him at the mercy of the Ulster Unionists. Indeed, on one of the last close votes, when the official Unionists voted against the Tories, the government survived only with the support of the absurdly named Democratic Unionists, the Rev Ian Paisley’s Bigot Party.So Major agreed in the autumn that he must do nothing to upset Ulster Unionists. Though the vast majority of people in Britain and in Ireland want to see the end of the union, this tiny band of bigots governs the political agenda on the subjectMajor’s ‘new realism’ in Ireland coincided with a fresh attempt by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party to include Sinn Fein in the constitutional talks. After the lamentable failure of its renewed bombing campaign, the pendulum in the IRA swung back in favour of another ceasefire. The only condition Sinn Fein imposed was its immediate participation in the talks. The Irish government rapturously accepted the condition. But Major, nervous of his majority, refused. He imposed a series of ludicrous conditions for Sinn Fein’s entry into the talks-conditions which he knew could not be accepted. There follows an uneasy stalemate in which the pendulum is swinging back to sectarian violence. The hideous attacks on Catholics by Orange gangs in Ballymena remind everyone how awful that violence can be.The main cause of the stalemate of course is the Major government’s approach, a grotesque combination of rhetoric for peace and practical intransigence. The initial ceasefire was squandered, and a new one is spurned. Yet the grim record also exposes the dilemma of the Sinn Fein and nationalist leaders. Their determination to make almost any concession to appease the United States government has left them high and dry when they are rebuffed by the British. They must either return to hopeless violence, which almost everybody in Northern Ireland dreads, or cling to Clinton’s coat tails.Irish workers, North and South, do not want sectarian violence- but nor do they want the capitalism represented by Clinton, Major and Bruton. The fruits of that capitalism are increasingly intolerable on both sides of the border. A recent House of Commons question exposed the fact that living standards in 31.4 percent of households in the North of Ireland fall below half the British national average, a staggering statistic of degradation which is matched by similar figures in the South. A socialist strategy of uniting these poverty stricken working masses across the sectarian border could break the deadlock imposed on Ireland from Clinton in Washington and the Major/Trimble alliance in London. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHow Barbara forgot the starving massesand learned to love the bossesA political profile(5 April 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 116, 5 April 1969, pp. 2–3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IT WOULD TAKE a long and fruitless search to discover a Labour Party member more uncompromisingly reactionary, than Joe Gormley, of the Yorkshire Mineworkers Union.Yet it was Gormley who, at the Labour Party National Executive on March 26, moved a resolution condemning the government’s White Paper in Place of Strife.As soon as Gormley had spoken, an amendment to the motion, approving her own white paper was moved by Mrs Barbara Castle, Minister of Employment and Productivity.Mrs Castle spoke modestly for more than half an hour of her painstaking work and wonderful achievements. The amendment was then defeated, with only five votes (all from Ministers) in its favour.The long courtship between the Labour Party’s ‘Left wing’ and Mrs Castle was at an end.Nothing serves a Labour career politician better than the ‘firebrand image’, and no one has developed it more meticulously than Barbara Castle.In her days in the Socialist League before the war, the Metropolitan Water Board during the war and the Bevanite group of Labour MPs after the war (she has been in parliament for Blackburn since 1945) she developed a militant ‘conference’ rhetoric which proved irresistible to the rank and file. Developed Radical ImageFrom the outset, Mrs Castle protected her career as scrupulously as she developed her radical image. She it was who introduced Harold Wilson to the Bevanites, after working after the war as his Parliamentary Private Secretary.Of Wilson’s work at the Board of Trade to revitalise British capitalism after the war, she told a Huyton audience in 1950:‘He was a man who was a hero to his PPS.’In the mid-fifties, the Bevanite group began to split between the firebrands who believed in outright opposition to the party leadership and the firebrands who argued that the best way to beat the leadership was to join it.At the end of 1955, the Labour leader-elect, Hugh Gaitskell, told a newspaper that ‘the only Bevanites I would have in a government would be Dick Crossman, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’.Mrs Castle straddled both horses – Gaitskellite and Bevanite – by concentrating almost exclusively, from 1956 to 1964, on foreign affairs.She it was who moved the the 1957 resolution at the Labour Party Conference urging that at least one per cent of the national income should be spent on aid to the underdeveloped countries.‘This is,’ she said, ‘a very specific commitment and a very important one.She it was who raised a lot of fuss about the savagery of British troops in Cyprus and who became first chairman of the anti-apartheid movement and promised that a Labour government would cancel the South African order for Buccaneer aircraft.Thus she remained a militant without ever fully supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or even the campaign for more nationalisation. Avoided Crucial IssuesMilitant expressions of solidarity with the independence movements in Africa and elsewhere enabled Mrs Castle to avoid more crucial questions at home, chief among which was the problem of the incomes policy.Before 1964, there is very little on Mrs Castle’s record about economic and incomes problems, and she fell neatly into line with the confusing jibberish about a ‘planned growth of incomes’.Mrs Castle’s radicalism was confined almost entirely to her use of words and her obsession with the problems of everyone except those living in Britain.In 1964 she was given a chance to put some of what she had been saying into effect. As Minister for Overseas Development, she improved on her rhetoric about the starving millions and as Minister of Transport she demonstrated that she is an expert in public relations.She even expressed a little public anger at the August 1965 Immigration White Paper and, once, threatened to resign if there was any sell-out to Ian Smith. But the reality of office soon put an end to these childish protests. When Wilson re-shuffled his cabinet early last year he sought around for a loyal, successful Minister to operate the incomes policy.Barbara was the obvious choice. Her radicalism did not stretch to workers’ problems at home. She saw ‘the case’ for matching wage increases with productivity. Workers and trade unionists she believed, could easily be won round to ‘common sense’ with a dash of public relations.The cup of tea with the Ford women strikers was a suitable start to a dismal year in which all Mrs Castle’s vitriol, once directed against South African racialists or British imperialism, has been turned against the people who voted her and her colleagues into power. Anti-Worker LegislationThe Tory cliches of a century – ‘lost production’, ‘pointless strikes’, ‘the world not owing us a living’ – have been used to push through the most anti-worker legislation since the Combination Acts.This is not just a personal sell-out. It is the natural development from the phoney and sentimental radicalism which hypnotised the labour movement in the 1950s.*Down the slippery slope’Our slogan is: “You cannot trust the Tories.” You cannot trust them because they don’t understand the economics of expansion, the theory that you will only increase wealth by spreading it. When the general election comes we shall make it a national remembrance day for the Rent Act and for what the government has done to our coal and cotton industries.’ September 1959Following Tory victory at at the polls: ‘The working class movement has been divided and weakened. The call must be for political and not merely industrial militancy on the part of trade unions. We have affirmed our belief that it is impossible for us to achieve the moral and social aims for which we stand – a just society, the dignity of the individual, full democracy, the end of the exploitation of man by man throughout the world – unless we transform the economic base of our society and make it one in which common ownership is predominant. Only in this way can we subordinate the growing power of private economic giants in the common interest.’ March 1959"
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"content": "On equal pay for women: ‘Women have waited long enough for this elementary piece of justice. The only answer now is legislation and I’m delighted that a Labour government is pledged to introduce this.’ May 1968‘I am not going to preside over a prices and incomes policy under which we tell our people that they have just got to grin and bear things for the next two years. They are a spirited lot and they won’t do it anyway. Harold Wilson has put me in this job to find ways by which we can all help ourselves to an improvement in the quality of our lives within the context of the essential economic policy.’ April 1968‘Any individual increases in top salaries are as much subject to the influence of the prices and incomes policy as any wage in this land ... I will never ask wage earners in this country to hold back and make sacrifices if people with top salaries are not going to show any sense.’ July 1968.‘I am profoundly convinced that the operation of the prices and incomes policy enables us to concentrate on the continuation of the reforms which benefit the workers, the industry and the nation.’ December 1968 Top of the pageLast updated on 13 January 2021"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootCan Labour win?(March 1989)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 118, March 1989, pp. 16–19.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The fortunes of the Labour Party in the opinion polls has risen in recent weeks. But the party is still only about level with what should be a deeply unpopular Tory government. Many Labour supporters have concluded from this that Labour cannot succeed in winning the next election. Paul Foot looks at the reality.WHEN THE Labour Party was first formed, and had to win votes from the Liberals, politics for Labour Party people was saying what you believed and persuading people to vote for it. Today, stricken by psephology, politics for Labour is finding out what most people believe and pretending to agree with them.It sounds so logical. Political power, we are told, is winning elections. Surely, the way to win elections is to say what people think. Then they vote for you; you win an election, and you have political power.The guide, therefore, is not politics, but polls. The polls tell us people don’t like divided parties so Labour cuts down on argument. The polls tell us people believe Britain should be defended. So former CND stalwarts suddenly conclude that since that nice Mr Gorbachev isn’t an enemy any more, we really need nuclear weapons in this country. Above all, the polls say that Labour is too extreme. So Labour must be moderate. Unless Labour is united, right wing and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it can’t win an election.All through 1988 the polls showed an obstinate ten point Tory lead over Labour. The psephologists in the Labour Party draw from that a grim conclusion. Labour won’t win. Labour can’t win.Some Labour supporters have decided to sit it out until the next defeat, hoping for some change after that. Others search for an elixir from the voting system itself: a different way of returning people to parliament, perhaps, or a pact with Paddy Ashdown.No-one in all this scrambling talks politics. No-one even wonders what they think themselves. They find out what other people think, and move further and further right until there seems to be precious little difference between them and the Tory enemy.Is it really the case that Labour can’t win? Is it really true that “old fashioned social democratic parties” are out of date in the late 1980s?Anyone who says yes has not looked even as far as across the English Channel. Most of Europe today is dominated by social democracy. In Greece the social democratic PASOK has won the last two elections with handsome majorities. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) has done the same. In France in the 1980s there has only been a brief period of anything approaching Thatcherite conservatism. The French President calls himself a socialist. He beat the Tory Chirac by a substantial margin only last year.In Germany there is a conservative government, not half as right wing as Thatcher’s. It has won the last two elections by narrow margins, but it is in deep distress. Within the last few weeks the German Tory Party (the CDU) lost nine percentage points of its vote in West Berlin, which it has held comfortably for 20 years.The Social Democrats gained five points, and the same number of seats as the conservatives. In Italy for much of the 1980s the Prime Minister has been a social democrat.Recent European Election Results*GERMANY: FRANCE:1983198719811988SPD193SPD186Socialists285Socialists276CDU191CDU174RPR88URC271CSU 53CSU 49UDF 63 GREECE:SPAIN:1981198519821986PASOK172PASOK162PSOE202PSOE184New Democracy115New Democracy125CDU106Christian Parties105* number of seatsThere is nowhere in Europe where there is not a social democratic government or an excellent chance of one in the near future.What explains this difference in the success record in the 1980s between British Labour and its European counterparts? Can it be that Britain has the smallest peasantry in Europe and possibly the world? It has a much smaller peasantry than its former colony Jamaica, which has just returned by a vast majority a social democratic government under a leader who was beaten out of sight eight years ago.Perhaps it is poor Mr Kinnock’s unilateral disarmament policy which hangs (to borrow a cliche universally used by political correspondents) “like an albatross” round his neck? No doubt the champion social democratic leaders in Europe have all shot their albatrosses long ago.No, not true either. The two most successful social democratic parties in Europe in the 1980s – the Spanish PSOE and the Greek PASOK – have gone to the electorate with strong anti-nuclear programmes, and (in the case of Greece) “a solemn pledge” to rid the country of the menace of American military bases.So is there something in the history of British Labour which suggest a terminal decline in the Labour vote?The closest parallel to the psephological pessimism which now saps Labour was in 1959, 1960 and 1961, in the period just after the Labour Party had been beaten three times in a row, each time by a bigger majority.Familiar lamentations filled the air. People had “never had it so good”. The working class didn’t exist any more. If it did, it was only interested in what the New Statesman (then, as now, the leading left wing lamenter) called “the telly in the parlour and the mini on the kerb”.For some reason, left wing intellectuals found special fault with that great liberator, the washing machine. Washing machines, it was widely declared, had sapped the voting loyalty of Labour women. Freed from the splendid old working class habit of washing garments by hand, they were listening to the radio and voting for Harold Macmillan.A psephologist called Mark Abrams wrote a pamphlet entitled Must Labour Lose? He concluded that such were the changes in the class structure of Britain that Labour could never again win an election outright. Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP in Leicestershire, and others who were even closer to the Labour leader, a fervent cold warrior called Hugh Gaitskell, demanded talks with the Liberal Party about electoral pacts."
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"content": "The Tory majority in parliament in 1959 was slightly larger than it is today under Mrs Thatcher. The Tory share of the vote in 1959 was six points higher than Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1983 or 1987. The grip of the “never had it so good” philosophy seemed to be unshakeable.Yet, very suddenly, at the end of those years, the whole Tory edifice fell apart. Macmillan started sackingCabinet Ministers all over the place. Labour climbed rapidly in the polls and overturned a huge Tory majority without any electoral pacts or proportional representation.Did Labour achieve this miracle by declaring suddenly for an independent deterrent?Not at all. It was, said Harold Wilson, “neither independent or a deterrent”. Labour ran an election campaign committed to scrapping the Polaris missile. He demonstrably won the argument with the Tories on the issue.Was Harold Wilson to the right of Hugh Gaitskell?Did he appear to the electorate as a more moderate, more responsible statesman who would be more welcome in the White House than Hugh Gaitskell?Nothing of the kind. Wilson was a former chairman of the Tribune Group of left wing Labour MPs. He had made extravagant speeches against American and French imperialism in South East Asia.He resigned from the Labour cabinet in 1951, arguing that money which Gaitskell wanted to spend on weapons should be spent instead on a free National Health Service and on aid to poor countries. His policy was not to abandon public ownership but to seize control of the “commanding heights of the economy”. It was not to tame the trade unions, but to allow free collective bargaining.He signalled well before the election that an important member of any new Labour cabinet would be the militant, unilateralist leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, Frank Cousins.Of course, Labour’s policy was not a socialist one. Indeed, Harold Wilson’s devious rhetoric was the language of “dynamic free enterprise” of “cutting the dead wood out of the boardrooms”, to replace old fashioned exploiters with new fashioned ones.But at least in 1963 and 1964 Labour was not the whingeing, backtracking, excuse-peddling rump it had seemed in 1961, but a confident, aggressive and purposeful political party every bit as “left wing” as the more placid organisation which had gone down to defeat three times in the 1950s.The facts of the Labour Party’s own history and the electoral facts in other European countries do not match the pessimism of the psephologists. Indeed even their own figures seem, as this is written, to contradict their own conclusions. In February 1989, the Gallup Poll, always the leader in the field, had to be checked three times before its omniscient organisers would allow it to be published. The psephologists had been talking for so long about Labour’s terminal decline, about the need for a middle ground party, about Mrs Thatcher’s political omnipotence that they could not believe their own figures.In one month, Labour’s percentage of the vote jumped by an astounding five points. The Tories had dropped two; and the “impossible gap” – the gap which could only be breached by fumbling political neuters in the centre – was down from 8.5 to 1.5 percent.Desperately, the psephologists sought an answer to this phenomenon. A second army of questioners were sent out into the field. Why had so many voters, without asking permission of Ivor Crewe or Peter Kellner, dared to change their minds in this unexpected direction?The change had come before Mr Kinnock had started making noises in favour of keeping Polaris and Trident. Some comfort came from the answers on the Health Service. Mr Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for the “accountability” (profitability) of the NHS were, it was discovered, unpopular. But there was nothing surprising about that. Tory policies on the Health Service had always, all through the 1980s, been unpopular. So, for that matter, were their policies on water and electricity privatisation, on mortgages, the poll tax, on pretty well everything they were doing. An answer could not be found.The electorate were fickle, unpredictable. They were changing, and not a psephologist in the country dared to predict whether they would go on changing or slip back again into that nice comfortable “mould”.Psephology poses as science. It promotes professors, creates entire departments of politics in the universities. But it is not a political science at all. It is merely a record of what people think. It is almost useless as a record of why people think, and absolutely useless as a guide as to how people change their minds.These matters are embedded in the political structure of a society, which is, for all the double talk on the left in recent years, still essentially and vitally a class society. How people think and vote depends upon their confidence and their aspirations. These will shift, often with startling speed, according to the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes.When one side wins, the other side loses. When one side is winning, their class confidence rises – while the confidence of their enemy falls. Victories and success for either side breed confidence – and the urge to continue the victories and success.Those who say that unemployment and degradation are necessary conditions for socialism don’t understand the motor of social change. Empty stomachs and cold, bare homes lead far more often to despair and reaction than to insurrection and hope.In general, then, the years of mass unemployment – the early 1930s for instance, or the early 1980s – are not Labour’s years. They are Tory years. When people lose confidence in themselves, they seek it elsewhere – in things which are theirs by accident like the colour of their skin. When people are fully employed, precisely when they have those washing machines, when they believe that their children will have a better life, then working class confidence increases, blossoms into cooperation, and reaches out for new ways to organise society."
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"content": "Growing working class confidence has another effect. It pulls with it those who believe they are middle class: people who work for high wages and who dabble at the edge of the capitalist pool. These are the weather vanes of class society. When the workers are winning, the middle class flock to their standard. In the early 1970s London was full of middle class people leaping out of their Volvos demanding to know the way to the revolution. When the bosses are winning, those same people almost overnight become the most virulent opponents of all those who might take away from them the golden crumbs which fall to them from the booming Stock Exchange.Elections in Britain, and anywhere else in the industrialised world, are won or lost by this middle class. One significant development in elections over the last thirty years has been the decline in the automatic allegiance to both the Tory and the Labour Party. As more and more people see themselves as middle class, so the fickleness of the electorate increases. This does not mean, as our psephologist would have it, that the struggle between the classes is less relevant to elections, and to politics generally.On the contrary, if anything the state of the struggle is more relevant, since there are more floaters to be won for this side or for that. Mrs Thatcher, as a determined and class conscious fighter, knows that quite well. She knows that what wins elections for her are class victories in the field. She knew after 1983 that the way to sustain her unpopular government in office was to win on the most important battlefield of all. Once victorious, whether at Orgreave or at Wapping, she knew the majority of the waverers would stay with her.The relationship between class confidence and voting, however, is not uniform, or bound by formula. Often, social democratic governments can win office in elections when the class they represent is being beaten.The classic example in British history is the general election of 1929. Labour, in full flight after the miners strike, with its socialists in a hopeless minority, and its policy almost indistinguishable from that of the Liberals, won more seats than any other party, and formed a minority government.Equally, when the working class is strong and confident, the results may not show themselves dramatically in elections. In 1974, for instance, when two miners strikes had been won, and all kinds of working class victories chalked up in the field, the Labour vote was even lower than it had been in 1970 (when they lost the election). A minority Labour government was formed after the Liberal Party had scored more heavily than at any other election since the war.What is certain, however, is that the state of the class struggle determines how those governments behave. The 1929 government, elected in class weakness, was very quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. The defeat it suffered in 1931 after its leaders joined the Tories in a National Government, was the worst in the history of the party.On the other hand, the minority government of 1974 was much stronger than it looked. It took five years of capitalist attacks, assisted by compromising and backstabbing from the trade union leaders to wear down the class victories of the early 1970s and to usher a revitalised and greedy Tory Party back into the trough.This takes us to the last of the determinants of votes and elections: the steady drip-drip of Labour government failures throughout the century. There is a sort of ratchet whereby each Labour government apostasy pulls down the aspirations and confidence of people who vote Labour. There is an ocean between the genuine, if naive, belief even of men like Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s that full blooded socialism could somehow be introduced by Labour government laws and the obsession with the “social market” which passes for modern Labour Party theory.Each time a Labour government fails, it loses not just the next election but a great army of committed socialists and an army of committed voters. Those voters may come back. The act of voting requires so little commitment and effort that cowed and defeated workers may vote Labour, even in quite large numbers. But their expectation about what will come when they have voted Labour will be unfathomably lower than what they expected, say, in 1945.For all these reasons, the present policy of the Labour leaders, determined as it is by the psephologists works against even their own miserable aspirations. Any policy of standing back from any struggle, of refusing to recognise that there is a struggle, even of attempting to dampen down any struggle, serves only to damage their own prospects in the long term.When the nurses rose in fury against the government’s policy on the health service the reaction of even the best Labour protagonists such as Robin Cook was to disassociate themselves from the strike, even to urge the nurses back to work.When the P&O workers for a fleeting moment, with the sudden and unexpected assistance of lorry drivers, looked as though they might break one of the nastiest Tory employers in the land, the Labour leaders kept their distance.Again and again, on all sorts of issues, wherever a battle against the Thatcher government has loomed on the horizon, the Labour leadership has set full sail in the opposite direction. For them, there is no connection whatever between class struggle and their own electoral prospects. Indeed, as Neil Kinnock said on television early in February, there is, as far as he is concerned, no class struggle, nor even any classes.His job, he said demurely, was to serve nation, not class. In this way the Labour Party leaders contribute to the stench of class defeat.What can they hope for from such a policy? As the February Gallup poll shows, all is not necessarily lost to them. They may gain votes from Tory blunders."
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"content": "But what are the consequences of this policy – of wait and see – of ducking the strikes for fear of being dubbed militants; of supporting the SAS in Gibraltar or in Ireland for fear of being dubbed unpatriotic; of seeking the back door to office as Manley and Papandreou and Gonzalez and Mitterrand have done?The very most they can hope for, if all the political luck goes their way, is an electoral victory without a strong and confident working class – a recipe for another 1931, without the cushion of Empire to protect the British workers from the consequences.Better to shoot and miss than not to shoot at all. Better to risk the abuse of the gutter press than to watch in the sidelines as another group of workers, another abortion campaign, another effort to pull the troops out of Ireland goes down to defeat. Defeat is not inevitable as the psephologists pretend.It is the bright day that brings forth the adder. Even at its zenith, the Thatcher government is at its most vulnerable. Labour can win, and they can win in some strength if they support the struggles of their friends, build up the confidence of the workers and stop playing parlour games with their enemies. Top of the pageLast updated on 1 July 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThe triple whammy(September 1997)From Reviews, Socialist Review, No.211, September 1997, p.26.Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The Strange Death of Liberal EnglandGeorge DangerfieldSerif £14.99It is a rare pleasure not just to recommend a book but to insist with all possible powers of persuasion that anyone lucky enough not to have read it should instantly treat themselves. George Dangerfield’s book covers a period of intense warfare – though the warfare is not as popular as it usually is among historians since the wars were not between nations or races but between governed and governors in the same country. What makes that warfare even more distasteful to official palates is that against all odds the wrong side, the dispossessed, seemed to be winning.The book covers three areas of revolt: the Irish revolt against British rule (and the revolt against that revolt of the Orangemen of the North); the revolt of the women, who had no vote, even though some 60 percent of the men had it; and the revolt of the workers against their employers. Each of these stories takes up about 100 pages, and the last quarter is devoted to what Dangerfield calls ‘the crisis’, the amazing first seven months of 1914 in which all three revolts came to the brink of victory only to be consumed in the unspeakable atrocity of the First World War. More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects.There are, of course, many history books about this period, many of them written from a position friendly to workers, suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and many of them perhaps more scrupulous with the facts or closer to what might be considered the correct line. Even after 61 years, however, George Dangerfield’s book is supreme. Every page, indeed every sentence, is lifted above the average by his irresistible writing style. The hallmark of this style is that most dangerous of all the weapons in the challenger’s armoury: mockery. The whole book is a mockery of the pretensions of the rulers of the time, most notably the mandarins of Asquith’s Liberal government.Dangerfield describes Asquith as the sort of person you would expect to find at high tables at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, ‘a man almost completely lacking in imagination or enthusiasm’. The same merciless mockery is turned on the Orange leader Carson, the Tory leaders under Bonar Law, the Irish Nationalist parliamentary leader John Redmond, the employers and their indefatigable government negotiator George Askwith. Ministerial reactions and statements are constantly reduced to that ridiculous hypocrisy and pomposity which derives from a relentless desire to hang on to other people’s property.The theme of the book is the collapse of a L(l)iberalism which only in 1906 had seemed unassailable. In the general election that year the Tories were engulfed by the biggest parliamentary landslide achieved by any party ever. Their huge majority was reduced to nothing in the two elections of 1910, and the Liberal government became dependent for its survival on the Irish Nationalists. This is all old hat, churned over by innumerable students of official parliamentary politics. The thrill of Dangerfield’s book is that he carries the Liberal government’s impotence far beyond the boundaries of parliamentary statistics.The government and increasingly the entire ruling class were trapped by what he calls ‘a new energy’ among the downtrodden which grew to such a proportion as to challenge the very right of the ruling class to govern.In Ireland the government was trapped by its reluctance either to accede to the mutinous forces under Carson or (even less) to give way to the growing demand for Irish independence. On suffrage, the government was trapped by a reluctance to extend the vote either to unpropertied men or to women (the two reluctances, as the book proves, were closely allied). The greatest parliamentary impotence of all, however, was brought about by the constant strikes of a newly confident working class. In 1911, 961,000 workers were involved in strikes, a figure which seemed impossible – and was 300,000 higher than ever before. In 1912, however, the figures had risen again to a fantastic 1,233,016. Dangerfield brilliantly describes the most devastating feature of these strikes: their unpredictability. Government negotiators, employers, trade union leaders – all were powerless not only to handle the strikes but even to predict where and when they would happen next.On all three fronts, in those early months of 1914, the prospects looked good. In Ireland a civil war loomed, with the favourites the armed volunteers who demanded total independence for all Ireland. Votes for women, as Dangerfield reveals, were effectively conceded in June 1914, though more as the result of the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst and her working class supporters than her sister Christobel from her safe vantage point in Paris. Above all, the workers’ revolt had crystallised into a triple alliance of the big unions which threatened a general strike.In these circumstances, the impotence of the government brought it home to the British ruling class that they could no longer afford two political parties, one reactionary, one allegedly reformist. The Liberal Party was finished, never again to re-emerge as a remotely relevant force in British politics. Good riddance, says George Dangerfield, in a typical but scintillating display of his glorious prose style, and in a passage which should be read with interest by the apostles of modern Lib-Labourism:‘The Liberal government was dying with extreme reluctance and considerable skill; you might almost consider it healthy, unless you took a very close look, and it had erected such a fence around it of procrastination and promises that a close look was almost impossible to obtain."
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"content": "‘The workers were simply dissatisfied with it, they could hardly tell why; and indeed that fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom was beyond the understanding of all but the elect. To interfere in the questions of pensions, of health, strikes, education, conditions of labour – ah yes this could be done; to destroy the absolute powers of the Lords, to cripple the vast landed estates – such actions were highly desirable; but to insist that employers should pay a living wage? That was a frightful impairment of freedom’. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootShip without a keel(June 1994)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 176, June 1994, p. 5.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The triumph for the Labour Party in the council elections (to be everyone agrees, by something very similar in the European elections this month), has a soothing effect on lots of socialists. Buoyed by success at the polls, some of Labour’s most militant supporters are inclined to that it is now time to sit back wait for the general election victory which is now inevitable.At an SWP meeting during the MSF conference, a delegate angrily rejected calls for more militant trade union action. Militancy, he said, had not won any gains in the last few years. Now was the time to concentrate all our hopes and efforts on getting Labour elected.‘Don’t rock the boat, and wait for Labour to storm back into office in 1996 (or 1997).’ That’s the convenient and easy message which seems to have been the favourite at trade union conferences this summer, and will certainly be the tune of the new Labour leader and the conference which elects him.Precisely the same attitudes and advice prevailed in Labour when it was last riding high in the polls, after the poll tax demonstration in 1990, Such fantastic gains were made in the council elections a week or two later – and in by-elections right across Britain – that almost everyone reckoned it a near certainty that Labour would win in 1992. The only danger was the activities of the ‘wild men’, or, to use Neil Kinnock’s favourite term of abuse, ‘the headbangers’. Kinnock and his team made it their main aim in life to life to squash the left, especially in the constituencies. Labour policy shifted further and further to the right. There was universal silence and acquiescence ... and Labour lost the election.All the gains made by employers and reactionaries through all those years of restraint ended with the employers and reactionaries winning the election for the sake of which they had been afforded such a clear run. The gloom on that frightful April night in 1992 was compounded by the fact that a network of militants had been persuaded to make all sorts of concessions in order to win the prize which had now been plucked away from them.The Labour leaders’ main mistake was to measure the political temperature solely by the opinion polls. Polls say how people are going to vote. They seldom record the enthusiasm for one preference or the other. And they are quite incapable of forecasting when public opinion will change.Those of us who take the view that the chief characteristic of our society is that It is divided by class, consider first this question: how are the classes doing in their battle with one another? If the rulers are winning, then, whatever the shifts in opinion polls, they are more likely to win elections; if the workers are winning, then their representatives are more likely to win elections. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, but in most cases the ebb and flow of the class struggle will determine the ebb and flow of radical and reactionary opinion, and so determine what happens at election times. If change can and does take place as the result of workers’ action, or even as a result of elected councillors taking a stand against central government, the party arguing for change will find it much easier to win.This is the background to the argument about the course for Labour in the next two years. The Major government is probably the most unpopular government this century. But the opposition is a ship without a keel. It is based not on the firm foundation of a confidence and strength which knows that it can shake employers and roll back the priorities of Tory administrators and bureaucrats. On the contrary, in the real political struggle, the struggle between the classes, the Tories – the employers and their banks – are winners. The success of the new breed of Thatcherite ‘line managers’, arrogant, offensive, untalented but in the workplace extremely powerful, is testimony to long, long years of ruling class confidence.Like that ship without a keel, such an opposition is vulnerable. No amount of votes piled up in municipal or Euro elections can guarantee it that elusive general election victory. The votes and the widespread fury which they represent need the ballast of class victories.Labour victories at the polls need to be reinforced by real labour victories. The Tories must be humiliated long before the next general election. The confidence of those line managers needs to be cut down by organised labour. The trade union leaders have ‘been backing off a fight ever since Thatcher first brought the Tories into government in 1979. All they have to show for the deference and obedience is a long line of defeats.These will go on unless the union leaders take a stand. If they don’t, their members will have to do it on their own. There is an overwhelming argument now for refusing any longer to accept the demands of ever greedy management; and for fighting back.This is not only a matter for shop stewards and trade unionists. In the Labour councils too there are all sorts of ways in which the Tories can be counted out. The councils have huge sums of money piled up from the sale of council houses. The Tories forbid them to spend that money. They should refuse to obey the Tories and spend it. If they are surcharged they should refuse to cooperate, resign their chairs and go into majority opposition. They should make the councils unmanageable rather than accept any longer the diktats of a government which has plainly lost the support of the people."
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"content": "Labour councillor should resign from all the new government quangos, the development corporations, enterprise agencies, city challenges and all the rest of the business speak nonsense whereby the capitalists have sought to undermine democracy in the urban areas. Up to now Labour representatives have played along; they should call a halt and let the quangos stew in their own juice.Defiance, if widespread and determined enough, would start to win concessions and victories. These will be worth in real ideas and in real votes a hundred times the lead in the opinion polls, and will lay some sort of foundation for a Labour victory which could mean something. Top of the pageLast updated on 17 April 2017"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPoetry of protest(July/August 1992)From Socialist Review, No.155, July-August 1992, pp.18-20.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Like most poets, Shelley, born two hundred years ago, seems to have little relevance to our lives and concerns today. On the contrary, argues Paul Foot, his poems are a powerful indictment of injustice and class division, and an inspiration for changeSHELLEY WAS BORN 200 years ago, and all over the world he will be celebrated in two very different ways. Those who honour him as a ‘great lyric poet’ will put him on a pedestal and pay him homage. At University College, Oxford, where Shelley was briefly educated, they are planning a great feast. No one will be allowed to mention that Shelley was expelled from the college after only two terms for writing the first atheist pamphlet ever published in English.A quite different set of celebrations is being arranged by the descendants of the people for whom Shelley cared and wrote: the common people, and especially the workers. Very early on in his life Shelley developed a passionate hatred and contempt for the class society in which he found himself. His main teacher was the philosopher William Godwin who put into English the glorious ideas of the Enlightenment. Godwin spurned all revolutionary activity. He sought to change the world by changing people’s minds – a quite hopeless project since people’s thoughts, left to themselves, are at the mercy of their rulers’ propaganda. Shelley worshipped Godwin, but could never agree with his appeals to passivity. He flung himself at once into revolutionary activity. At Oxford he wrote his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which ridiculed all religion. He sent it to every bishop in Oxford demanding a debate. He was on the high road out of the city within half an hour of the first bishop choking over the freshly opened envelope at the breakfast table.Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his Address to The Irish People, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later.All this political writing and activity was carried out in almost total isolation. Shelley was inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, but he lived in a time of counter-revolution. The great revolutionary poets of the 1790s – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – were stampeding to the right. Their talent and wit, so effectively directed against the politicians, kings and priests of the ancien regime, was now being deployed in their defence.Shelley was not, as these three were, a renegade. He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the Ode to Liberty and Hellas, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor.But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – The Mask of Anarchy. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times.The ruling class was terrified. The yeomanry, a special police force consisting mainly of wealthy tradesmen, had a single plan: to stop Hunt speaking and teach the new union upstarts a lesson. They charged into the crowd flourishing their weapons and screaming abuse. The crowd scattered where they could, but the yeomanry pursued them, slashing and stabbing with their swords as they went. Altogether 11 people died that day, and 150 more were seriously injured.When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing. "
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"content": "THE MOST POWERFUL element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like Prometheus Unbound are very wide. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. He wrote in short, strong stanzas, four or (occasionally) five lines apiece, which left him very little room for manoeuvre. The result is electric. The poem starts with a description of a masquerade, in which strange and horrifying shapes appear before the poet, all of them disguised in the masks of the Tory ministers of the day. Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, butcher of the Irish rebellion of 1798, appears as Murder. Seven bloodhounds, the seven countries which signed the Treaty of Vienna which carved up Europe after the counter-revolutionary victory of Waterloo, follow him, fed by their master with human hearts. One by one they glide past ‘in this ghastly masqueradeAll disguised, even to the eyesAs bishops, lawyers, peers and spies.’Shelley hated them all. They represented the chaos of the hideous class society of the time. This Chaos comes last in the parade, ‘on a white horse, splashed with blood.’ He is Anarchy. In more recent times anarchy has come to be used as a word of the left. But in Shelley’s day the word had no such progressive meaning. It meant horror, chaos, violence. To Shelley it meant what the poem says is written on the brow of the ghastly skeletal figure on the white horse: ‘I am God and King and Law.’This line is repeated again and again by Anarchy and his sycophants as they carve their bloody path through England. The picture is one of repression and tyranny so horrible and so intransigent that change seems impossible.Shelley’s own protest all his short life had been impotent. Many of his angriest poems end in an empty plea or hope that things will get better. But in The Mask of Anarchy he is inspired by what terrified the yeomanry at Manchester – the enormous potential power of the demonstration. His wishes and hopes now have some substance to them. What happens next in the poem, at the very height of the arrogant oppression of Anarchy and his courtiers, is an act of defiance. A ‘maniac maid’ calling herself Hope flies past with a simple message – she cannot wait any longer.Her father’s children are all dead from starvation – every one except her. The time has come for action, apparently desperate, hopeless action, but action nonetheless:‘Then she lay down in the streetRight before the horse’s feetExpecting with a patient eyeMurder Fraud and Anarchy.’Suddenly there is change.‘Then between her and her foesA mist, a light, an image rose.’Many Shelley scholars have taken this ‘mist’ and ‘image’ to be a further sign of Shelley’s ‘prophetic vagueness’, yet another vague hope or wish. But it is much more than that. First, it is linked to the act of defiance of the oppressed. Secondly, as the poem goes on to explain, the ‘image’ changed into something quite different:‘Till as clouds grow on the blast,Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,And glare with lightnings as they flyAnd speak in thunder to the skyIt grew – a Shape arrayed in mailBrighter than the viper’s scale.’The vague image has become a ‘shape arrayed in mail’ – the iron fist to deal with the iron heel. Moreover, on its helmet, huge and distinct so that it can be seen a long way off,‘A planet, like the Morning’s, lay;And those plumes its light rained throughLike a shower of crimson dew.’This is no gentle wish, but an armed class warrior helmeted with the Morning Star, the symbol of organised labour.The ‘shape arrayed in mail’ is soon accompanied by an even more powerful force. Side by side with him, with every step he took towards his oppressors, ‘thoughts sprung’ among the multitude. The combination of armed resistance and thought was Irresistible. Anarchy and all his followers are vanquished. THAT IS A THIRD of the poem. The last two thirds consist of a speech by the ‘maniac maid’ who had flung herself at the horse’s hooves and started the whole process. This is a speech of openly revolutionary agitation, which combines all Shelley’s political ideas. It starts with a definition first of slavery, then of freedom. Classic definitions of both – at a time of bourgeois revolutions throughout Europe – concentrated on the freedoms of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.In Shelley’s time, when the government permitted none of these things, it seemed natural to concentrate on such matters. Then, as now, Liberty was more fashionable than Equality. What makes these definitions in The Mask of Anarchy most remarkable is that they begin and end with Shelley’s outrage at economic inequality. There are 13 verses defining slavery. All of them are about economic control. The first verse, in answer to the question ‘What is Slavery?’, goes like this:‘Tis to work and have such payAs just keeps life from day to day.’That sounds uncommonly like what Marx had to say in Capital about wages being kept to the level of the merest subsistence of the worker. One result, of course, is that the workers have no say in what they produce:‘So by ye for them are madeLoom and plough and sword and spadeWith or without your own will bentTo their defence and nourishment.’This is the theme of the poem – ’them and us’, they who have everything and keep it that way by fraud and force, and us who are left to suffer. There then follows a verse which shows how far Shelley had come since reading Tom Paine and Godwin. Britain had been transformed by the industrial revolution – economic growth at breathtaking speed was shifting the social scenery. Here is the process in Shelley’s definition of slavery;‘Tis to let the ghost of Gold,"
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"content": "Take from toil a thousandfoldMore than e’er its substance couldIn the tyrannies of old.’The rate of exploitation of labour had grown a thousand times. The ‘ghost of gold’ took ‘from toil’ incomparably more than in the old feudal tyrannies. This idea has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. It sounds more like Marx, but is unlikely to have come from him – he was one year old when The Mask of Anarchy was written.Slavery is economic exploitation. Freedom, then, is not a ‘name, echoing from the cave of fame’ but ‘clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.’ It is justice (a system of law where what happens in the courts is not bought and sold), peace, wisdom (freedom from religion), science, poetry and thought. Just as the poem seems to be drifting into idealism, Shelley suddenly breaks off in mid-verse, demanding ‘deeds, not words.’The last part of the poem is a call for another demonstration, stronger and more committed than at St Peter’s Fields. It should be made up of all the oppressed – recruitment for it should start at the very bottom of society.‘From the workhouse and the prisonWhere pale as corpses newly risenWomen, children, young and oldGroan for pain and weep for cold.’The demonstration should be prepared for another attack by the yeomanry, should meet it with civil disobedience, and should go on defying the forces of the government until the government was defeated by its own impotence over a risen people. Passages in this last section seem over-optimistic today. The belief for instance that the armed forces would split from the yeomanry and take the people’s side puts too much weight on reports of such a split at Peterloo. After fascism, Sharpeville and Tiananmen Square, the appeal of civil disobedience has lost its force. Nor were there any ‘old laws of England which preferred liberty to tyranny – the old laws were even worse than the current ones. But the theme of the poem easily survives these moments of delusion – the theme of anger and defiance, the theme that the long years of Tory government and reaction would come to an end just as soon as the oppressed, especially the new working class, became determined to resist. Peterloo, Shelley insisted, would be avenged.When he finished The Mask of Anarchy he sent it straight off to his friend Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical Examiner, But Hunt did not publish it. Publication in 1819 would have invited instant imprisonment for the author and the publisher. The poem was, after all, a call to arms, and a call so infectious and persuasive, so easy to commit to memory, that no one could predict its political impact. Hunt hung onto the poem long after Shelley’s death. He published it in 1831, as the urgent and unstoppable cry for parliamentary reform blended with a new working class resistance from Merthyr Tydfil to Glasgow. Then, and ever since, everyone who has ever been angry, as Shelley was, at the insufferable pain and arrogance of class society, has learnt the famous climax of this wonderful poem and proclaimed it with increasing urgency:‘And that slaughter to the nationShall steam up like inspiration,Eloquent, oracular;A volcano heard afar.And these words shall then becomeLike oppression’s thundered doom,Ringing through each heart and brainHeard again, again, again –Rise like lions after slumberIn unvanquishable numberShake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on you.Ye are many. They are few.’ Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootA Passionate Prophet of Liberation(June 1996)From International Socialism, 2 : 71, June 1996, pp. :131–141.Copyright © 1996 International Socialism.Downloaded with thanks from the International Socialism Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.A review of Blake by Peter Ackroyd, (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) and Witness against the beast – William Blake and the moral law by E.P. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1993)In London in the 1790s, like in London today, it was commonplace to see a woman being beaten up in the street, and equally common for embarrassed or irritated bystanders to pass by on the other side. William Blake had a short temper and often lost it. Walking in the St Giles area, and seeing a woman attacked, he launched himself on the scene with such ferocity that the assailant ‘recoiled and collapsed’. When the abuser recovered, he told a bystander that he thought he had been attacked by the ‘devil himself’. At around the same time Blake was standing at his window looking over the yard of his neighbour when he saw a boy ‘hobbling along with a log tied to his foot’. Immediately he stormed across and demanded in the most violent terms that the boy should be freed. The neighbour replied hotly that Blake was trespassing and had no business interfering in other people’s property (which included, of course, other people’s child labour). The furious argument which followed was only resolved when the boy was released.Some years later, in 1803, Blake was living in a country cottage in Sussex when he came across a soldier lounging in his garden. Blake greeted the soldier with a volley of abuse, and frogmarched him to the local pub where he was billeted. The soldier later testified that as they went, Blake muttered repeatedly, ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’ In the south of England in 1803, when soldiers were billeted in every village for fear of a Napoleonic invasion, such a statement was criminal treachery. The soldier promptly sneaked to his superiors. Blake was tried for sedition, and escaped deportation and even possibly a death sentence largely because the soldier made a mess of his evidence and because no one in court knew anything about Blake’s revolutionary views which had been openly expressed ten years previously. He was found not guilty, and went on writing for another 23 years until his death. He never once swerved from his intense loathing of king, soldiers and slavery.These are two of the hundreds of anecdotes in Peter Ackroyd’s glorious biography which will warmly commend Blake to any reader even remotely committed to reform. This warmth enthuses the whole book. Ackroyd revels in Blake’s ‘exuberant hopefulness’ which grew out of his passionate rage at the world he saw around him. The Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience which he wrote in the first fine careless rapture of the French Revolution are presented here not just in scholarly textual analysis but in admiration and wonder. Here is Blake’s disgust with slavery in The Little Black Boy:My mother bore me in the southern wild,And I am black, but O! my soul is white;White as an angel is the English child:But I am black as if bereav’d of light.The English child might indeed be ‘white as an angel’ but, if unlucky enough not to be born rich, he or she was likely to be a victim of the vilest exploitation. Ackroyd sets out the whole of Blake’s Song of Innocence called The Chimney Sweeper, which moves in six short verses from utter misery:When my mother died I was very youngAnd my father sold me while yet my tongueCould scarcely cry weep weep weep weepSo your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.To hope, in a dream which first sees all the sweeps in coffins, until:And by came an angel who had a bright keyAnd he opened the coffins and set them all free.Then down a green plain leaping laughing they runAnd wash in a river and shine in the Sun.And back again to a last verse which seems like an anti-climax:And so Tom awoke and we rose in the darkAnd got with our bags and our brushes to work.Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm,So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.When I first read that last verse, I took it for what it seemed: a sell out of the indignation which sets the poem off. How does Peter Ackroyd explain it?It has been suggested that this closing line is in sharp contrast to the rest of the poem but in fact it maintains precisely the same note; the innocence of the speaker, and of Tom himself, is a destructive and ignorant innocence because it actively complies both with the horrors of the climbing trade and of the society that accepts it without thought. It is the ‘unorganised innocence’ that can persuade a deformed or dying sweep that he is happy, after all, while confirming the credulous or the sanctimonious in their belief that ‘duty’ is all that needs to be, or can be done. Blake has dramatised a ‘state’ or an attitude without in the least acceding to it; then in the companion poem within Songs of Experience that shares the same title, he emphasises his disgust:And because I am happy, and dance and sing,They think they have done me no injury:And are gone to praise God and his Priest and KingWho make up a heaven of our misery.The point that the Songs of Experience often harden up the Songs of Innocence is also made by Edward Thompson, who does what Ackroyd has done for the Chimney Sweeper for the Song of Experience called London.I wander thro’ each chartered streetNear where the chartered Thames does flowAnd mark in every face I meetMarks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fearin every voice; in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear.How the chimney sweeper’s cryEvery blackning Church appalls;And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace wallsBut most thro’ midnight streets I hear"
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"content": "How the youthful harlots’ curseBlasts the new-born infants’ tearAnd blights with plague the marriage hearse.Edward Thompson traces the use of the word ‘chartered’ to the controversy between Edmund Burke (against the French Revolution) and Thomas Paine (for it). The ‘chartered’ towns excluded from any vestige of control what Burke called ‘the swinish multitude’. The soldier gave his blood for the palaces and the chimney sweep his life and limbs for the churches. Prostitution was the other side of the coin to marriage. The swinish multitude crops up again in a savage poem about a ‘chapel all of gold’ from which Blake sees a serpent turning away:Vomiting his poison outOn the bread and on the wine.So I turned into a styAnd laid me down among the swine.Blake could see more clearly than most of his contemporaries the rising consciousness of a new class which was being robbed as ruthlessly as any of its predecessors, and he sided unequivocally with the exploited and the poor. This commitment was never dull, never repetitive. It was invigorated and complemented by Blake’s illustrations and engravings. He annotated the books he read with neat and powerful notes which still survive and disclose his ideas and how he expressed them. The smooth talking, smooth painting and very fashionable Sir Joshua Reynolds was dealt with like this:Reynolds: I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed.Blake: A Liar. He never was abashed in his life & never felt his ignorance.Reynolds: I consoled myself by remarking that these ready inventors are extremely apt to acquiesce in imperfection.Blake: Villainy. A lie.Reynolds: But the disposition to abstractions is the great glory of the human mind.Blake: To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit. General Knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.Reynolds: The great use in copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning to colour.Blake: Contemptible.Reynolds: But as mere enthusiasm will carry you but a little wayBlake: Damn the fool. Mere enthusiasm is all in all.Thompson calls this Blake’s ‘robust contempt’ for the high and mighty, which he held in common with the other great iconoclastic poets of his time, notably Byron. Like Byron, Blake’s first reaction to the pretensions of great men was to laugh out loud. Byron’s view of his former foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh was succinctly expressed over the great man’s grave:Posterity will ne’er surveyA nobler scene than this.Here lie the bones of Castlereagh.Stop traveller, and piss.And here was Blake on the subject of the most respected philosopher of his day (and his devotion to the Classics):A ha to Dr JohnsonSaid Scipio AfricanusLift up my Roman petticoatAnd kiss my Roman anus.Add to all this Blake’s enduring belief in sexual liberation as a necessary condition of human freedom. ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect’, was his motto. Most sex was shut up in private fantasy:The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virginThat pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joysIn the secret shadows of her chambers; the youth shut up fromLustful joy shall forget to generate, & create an amorous imageIn the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.One answer was ‘lovely copulation, bliss on bliss’, a regular theme for Blake especially in his paintings and engravings. None of this was poetic licence for the release of male libido, as it plainly was for the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose church Blake joined. Blake, a bitter enemy of monogamy when applied as a church and state edict, lived all his life in apparently harmonious monogamy. He was at his testiest when official theorists and priests argued for discrimination against and/or seclusion of women. His views on these matters were close to those of his great contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft.Perhaps it was his constant harping on these sexual questions which explains another feature of Blake’s life common to many other reforming writers of the time. As Ackroyd points out, ‘He remained quite unknown in his lifetime.’ His engraving was patronised by famous writers and artists of the time, notably Henry Fuseli, but usually only for hack work much of which has perished. The poems which have fascinated critics all through the 20th century were hardly published, let alone read in his lifetime. He printed the Songs himself, very expensively, and sold very few copies. The Four Zoas, which Ackroyd describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary documents of the decades spanning the 18th and 19th centuries’ wasn’t published until 1889, 63 years after Blake’s death. Again most of Blake’s contemporaries dismissed him as ‘mad’. As he got older, people referred to him more and more as ‘the mad visionary’. Even W.H. Auden a century and a half later declared that ‘Blake went dotty as he sang’. In fact, of course, he was not mad at all. His close friend and colleague John Linell admitted he was often shocked by Blake but affirmed, ‘I never saw anything the least like madness.’ The reason for his ‘madness’ was familiar: he swam against the stream and refused to compromise what he said and never painted for commercial fortune.The hostility of polite society which prescribed him mad ended when he died. In old age he was, as ever, penniless and, as one shocked visitor put it, ‘dirty’. There were six people, including his wife, at his funeral and he was buried in a common grave. But death changed the open hostility to Blake into a grudging patronage which still prevails. Schoolchildren are taught to learn by rote the famous poem, Tiger, Tiger. They chant happily:In what distant deeps or skiesBurnt the fire of thine eyes?"
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"content": "But which of them connects the poem, written late in 1792, to the French Revolution, or to the press references after the September massacres in Paris to ‘tribunals of tigers’ or to the eyes of Jean Paul Marat gleaming ‘like those of a tiger cat?’ And which of those Tory matrons who round off their party conference every year with a spirited rendering of Blake’s poem Jerusalem have the remotest idea what Blake meant when he cried out for ‘arrows of desire’? How many of them have any idea, either, how determined was the commitment in his pledge, ‘I will not cease from mental fight’?Determined, filled with contempt for the rich and sympathy with the exploited and the poor, eloquent and passionate prophet of liberation of every kind, sane to his friends and family, mad to the outside world, dogged by poverty and calumny all through his 70 years, his poems and his art ignored in his life and patronised after it Blake seems to fit exactly into the pattern of other revolutionary poets of the time, most notably Shelley, who lived in London not far from Blake but never met him, and died aged 29 when Blake was 65. Can we happily place Blake alongside Shelley in the line of British poets and writers who emerged out of the French Enlightenment of the late 18th century and filled the gap between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848?No, we cannot. Here is the paradox about Blake, which is firmly tackled in different ways by both these books. Blake shared with Shelley all the qualities mentioned above. Yet there was a great gulf fixed between them. Shelley revered the Enlightenment, hailed the great contribution to democracy of Rousseau, the anti-clericalism of D’Holbach, the secular encyclopedias of Diderot. Above all he worshipped at the shrine of ‘reason’s mighty lore’. He was a rationalist, bitterly opposed to religion of every kind. He believed in open political activity to change the world. He wrote political pamphlets, tried to form political associations, subscribed to the campaigns to release the victims of oppression.Blake was none of these things and did none of them. Though he knew the circle round Thomas Paine, Holcroft, Horne Tooke and Mary Wollstonecraft, he did not associate with them. The story, made into a BBC play, that he advised Paine to flee from London is, Peter Ackroyd assures us, almost certainly apocryphal. This is how Peter Ackroyd explains the difference between Blake and the Painites:In many respects he was utterly unlike them. If points of religion had been brought up, for example, there would have been manifest differences. His friend in later life, Tatham, adds substance to the suggestion:‘In one of their conversations, Paine said that religion was a law and a tie to all able minds. Blake on the other hand said what he was always asserting: that the religion of Jesus was the perfect law of Liberty.’Paine also dismissed Isaiah as ‘one continual incoherent rant’ and Blake celebrated the glory of that prophet. Blake could hardly have been an enthusiast for the works of Joseph Priestley whose materialism and predestinarianism were utterly opposed to everything Blake considered holy. Nor can he have been very impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief in the ‘law of reason’ and ‘rational religion’.Blake came from an entirely different tradition, a tradition which execrated the ‘reason’ which inspired Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Priestley and Shelley. As we have seen he attended the newly formed New Church of Jerusalem which propagated the views of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. This was a Christian sect whose origins, like so many of its kind, derived from the eternal argument between the paid professionals of the Christian church established and maintained by ruling class robbers, and ordinary believers who want to keep their faith secure from the grasp of governments, monarchs, landowners and priests. Almost all these sects, therefore, practised and preached political disengagement as an essential feature of their faith. The Swedenborgians were specially insistent on this. They abominated the ridiculous tenets of the Trinity, with all the obeisance to God and God’s representatives on earth which it entails, and replaced it with a ‘divine presence’ in all human beings. Part of the proof of that divine presence was a devotion to sectarian secrecy which kept the believers apart from the real world. They were seen as cranks, of course, and therefore as suspect revolutionaries. When a drunken Birmingham mob, bribed by the authorities, sacked and burned the house of the rationalist Joseph Priestley, they headed for the Swedenborgian’s church to do the same. The church’s pastor, appropriately named Proud, rushed out to head off the crowd, explaining that he and his church had nothing to do with temporal matters such as the French Revolution or Joseph Priestley, and brandishing gold coins which he pressed into the mob leaders’ hands. This worked perfectly, and the crowd went away.Ackroyd and Thompson prove that Blake was no uncritical Swedenborgian. He criticised the New Church again and again. But his ideas were sharply hostile to those of the rational enlightenment. Where did they come from? E.P. Thompson strives to find a ‘vector’ which carried Blake’s ideas to him from the 17th century. He fastens on a sect which grew up around John Reeve and Ludowich Muggleton after the defeat of the Levellers in 1649. This Muggletonian sect, as it became known, was ‘antinomian’, that is ‘against the law’. Its followers argued that the only real law was the law of the divine spirit inside each individual. The Muggletonians were subversive because they defied the law, but they blunted their subversiveness by keeping themselves to themselves in strict sectarian isolation."
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"content": "Half Edward Thompson’s book rather apologetically struggles and strains to establish this ‘missing vector’ between the Muggletonians and Blake. With one rather doubtful exception he can’t find a single credible connection. But he does provide an argument for some form of thread between Blake and the antinomian sectarians who sprung up during the Commonwealth and survived right up to his time (they only died out recently Thompson himself met the last of the Muggletonians in Tunbridge Wells!). The Muggletonians and Blake, Thompson argues, were suspicious of reason. Of course, the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ they disliked were the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of upper class intellectuals who told ordinary people what to think. But this spilled over into a suspicion of the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of people like Thomas Paine whose purpose was exactly the opposite: to assault and expose the rhetoric and arguments of the rulers, and to agitate among the ruled for action to change the world. In this sense, as Thompson grudgingly concludes, antinomian sects like the Muggletonians found themselves in opposition to the intellectual forces which led to the French Revolution.If William Blake was suspicious of its intellectual origins, however, he was most definitely not opposed to the revolution. For a short time he even walked the streets wearing the cap of liberty. The second half of Thompson’s book, which is much more exciting than the first, argues that for this short time there took place in Blake ‘a conjunction between the old antinomian tradition and Jacobinism’. Thompson’s close study of poems like London, The Human Abstract and the Garden of Love reveals a ‘burning indictment of the acquisitive ethic’ which goes far beyond the bounds of Muggletonian mysticism and takes Blake close to the revolutionaries.This is all fascinating, especially from a historian of the stamp of E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class (1973) is a classic for any socialist who wants to understand this period. But in trying to force the two traditions together, the rationalist revolutionary and the spiritualist antinomian, Thompson seems to abandon many of the lessons he himself spelt out in his monumental history. He writes:If Blake found congenial the Painite denunciation of the repressive institutions of State and Church, it did not follow that humanity’s redemption from this state could be effected by a political reorganisation of these institutions alone. There must be some utopian leap, some human re-birth, from Mystery to renewed imaginative life.This is not just an account of Paine’s view. It seems to be Thompson’s view too, for he repeats the phrase ‘utopian leap’ in the final paragraph of his book and concludes,‘To create the New Jerusalem something must be brought in from outside the rationalist system and that something could be found only in the non-rational image of Jesus, in the affirmatives of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love.’No conclusion of that kind can be found in The Making of the English Working Class, which starts with the founding of the London Corresponding Society, a working class organisation with ‘members unlimited’ which fought precisely and exclusively for parliamentary reform: that is, for the ‘political reorganisation of the institutions of State and Church’. The Society backed up the more feeble Society for Constitutional Information. The Making of the English Working Class goes on to chronicle all the attempts by the new ‘reformers from below’ to challenge and change the unrepresentative and repressive monarchy, parliament, press, church, landowners and employers who ruled Britain. There was no call from any of these reformers for a ‘utopian leap’ perhaps because no practical political leap, by definition, can be utopian. ‘Comrades, we shall now proceed to accomplish a utopian leap’, is not a practical slogan. The whole concept is an abstraction. The chief consequence of relying on an abstraction is political quietism. If you wait and hope for a utopian leap, there is nothing you can do about it. You can only wait and hope.Blake joined the New Church of the boring and ridiculous Swedenborgians, but he did not join the London Corresponding Society, or even the Society for Constitutional Information. He showed no interest in any of the agitations for parliamentary reform or against the gagging acts and repressive legislation at the end of the 1790s. When the Luddite leaders were hanged in 1813, there was no donation for their families from Blake (as there was from Shelley). When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising (1817) were executed or the Manchester yeomanry mowed down the parliamentary reformers at Peterloo (1819), there was no protest from Blake (as there was on both occasions from Shelley). Thompson compares Blake unfavourably to William Godwin, who is deservedly denounced for spouting his polite philosophy from the sidelines. But at least Godwin risked his neck by publicly supporting his friends on trial for treason in 1794, which is more than Blake managed to do. Indeed on more than one occasion, when the authorities threatened persecution, Blake specifically adapted and softened his language to keep himself clear of the prosecutors. If there was, as Thompson argues, a brief moment where his antinomianism merged with a Jacobin sense of outrage, the moment soon passed, and he hurried back to his splendid isolation.Peter Ackroyd quotes back at Blake a comment from his hero Milton:‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be fought for, not without dust and heat’."
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"content": "Blake, Ackroyd continues, ‘eschewed the “heat” of any public voice or role, but, as a result, it is as if he were another Milton raging in a darkened room’. I find all this illuminating because I confess that the bulk of Blake’s longer poems have always mystified and often irritated me. I do not mean only that the poems seem constantly to dissolve into imagery or metaphor. A lot of Shelley’s poetry does that too. But the imagery in Blake is too abstract, too unrelated, too much founded on utopian leaps. E.P. Thompson recognises this vagueness, but comes round to it. In one sense he almost revels in Blake’s isolation and his assaults on what Thompson (I think wrongly) calls ‘ideology’. Perhaps at the end of his life Thompson found in Blake some solace for his own political loneliness. Peter Ackroyd, a Blake enthusiast to the last, is more circumspect:His poetry is often one of declaration and assertion, just as his art resides upon the pictorial plane; much of his creative activity takes place on the immediate surface and there are occasions when an image, or a verse, seems to have no concerted or established sense with the proviso of course that this indeterminacy, this missing signification, is often part of a work’s power. It is like the oblique character of the man himself who, according to one interlocutor, made assertions without bothering with argument or debate; his work shares that same denotative brilliance, but sometimes at the expense of bewildering those who encounter it.I enrol myself in the ranks of the bewildered. But I will not end there because both these books have led me back to Blake and dug up treasures previously buried in mysticism and symbolism. The whole point of the poets who flourished in revolutionary times and who did not bow the knee to God or King or Law is that they have something significant to say to future revolutionaries. Blake should be read precisely because he was a maverick, a pain in the neck not just to the rulers but also to those who more formally and more rationally opposed the rulers. Whatever his religious origins and however haughty his disengagement, he believed perhaps more passionately than all his contemporaries in human emancipation, and he lived his life accordingly. In particular, he needs to be read by any socialist who imagines that in a society where labour is emancipated everyone will be the same and want the same.Is there anyone attempting to work in the tradition of William Blake today? Well, there is Leon Rosselson, a veteran London singer so full of wonderful tunes and emancipating poems that he is ignored by polite society as systematically as Blake was. His latest CD, Intruders, is full of both; and I commend it heartily as I commend both these books, especially Peter Ackroyd’s. The CD ends with a tune I find myself humming almost everywhere. The chorus is pure Blake, incorporating on the one hand the isolated, individualistic Blake who preferred abstract divinity to politics, and on the other the revolutionary Blake who saw perhaps more clearly than anyone else the fantastic, kaleidoscopic potential of human liberation:For all things are holy, the poet once said,And all that is different is part of the dance.And the web of life’s colours needs each single threadFor the dance to continue unbroken. Top of the pageLast updated on 8 November 2019"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot101 years of not thinking(May 1986)From Socialist Worker, 17 May 1986.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 96–7.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.FOR A FEW days last week the air was thick with the plummy noises of important people welcoming another lifelong rebel safely home to rest.Everyone loved Manny Shinwell. In the House of Lords, Lord Whitelaw; at his funeral, the Thatcher knight and editor of the Sunday Express, Sir John Junor; in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher herself – all rushed to honour Manny. I pause for a moment here because my mentor, Harry McShane, always said that there were only two of the Red Clydesiders for whom he ever had any time: John Wheatley and Emmanuel Shinwell.When I confronted him with the hideous reality of Emmanuel Shinwell in the early 1960s, Harry would shake his head and say, ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but you should have heard his speeches in the famous 40-hour strike in Glasgow in 1919’.Shinwell was magnificent during that strike and the vast agitation which accompanied it, Harry always insisted. Since he was there and his judgement on such matters was almost always impeccable, I accept it. But consider. Even by that time, most socialists had a healthy suspicion of Shinwell. He had not joined the strong anti-war movement in the West of Scotland working class at that time.After he came out of prison in 1919, he moved quickly to the right. He went to parliament in 1922 and was in government in 1924.He supported Ramsay MacDonald against Cook, Maxton and Wheatley in 1928; but was quick to turn on MacDonald when there was a chance of winning his seat from him In every single major argument in the Labour Party since, Shinwell has been on the right, if not on the extreme right.His former commitment to class war changed very quickly to a commitment to patriotic wars, almost every one of which he supported. He backed Eden and the Tories in their invasion of Suez in 1956. He backed Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 and I dare say he would have backed her in Libya too. He loved wars and Britain fighting them. No doubt that is why everyone calls him a ‘fighter’.He was a mean, spiteful, pompous, bullying man. He was always sneering at ‘middle class intellectuals’. He sneered, too, at political theory, especially Marxist theory, which, he boasted, he never read.This bluff common-man, give it-to-em-straight approach was good for an ovation at Labour Party conferences but Shinwell’s own life spells out the awful lesson of what happens to working class agitators when they stop thinking and reading. It is true that middle class socialist intellectuals are less reliable than working class socialist intellectuals. What the latter thinks cuts with the grain and their life experience, while for the former socialist theory cuts against that grain.But when working class socialists abandon intellect altogether, when they sneer at books and reading and places of learning and join in the jokes about how nobody can ever understand a word of Marx – then the road for them is Shinwell’s road, the same dreary march from youthful rebellion and enthusiasm to reactionary and platitudinous middle age and chauvinist, ennobled senility.People like Shinwell insult and corrupt the ideas which inspired them in their youth. And when they die, they allow those ideas to be neutered and patronised by Tory prime ministers and editors of the Sunday Express. Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBorn Unfree and Unequal(April 2003)From Socialist Review, No.273, April 2003, p.18-19.Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Capitalism’s claim of promoting democracy is continually undermined by the growing gap between rich and poor.In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Increase in inequalityThis is an ancient and familiar division. In the age of Bush and Blair, it has grown almost out of recognition. Both leaders and both governments are hell-bent on increasing it. Examples are so obtrusive and frequent that it is almost embarrassing to repeat them. A report earlier this year by the American Federal Reserve estimated that in the early Clinton years, 1992-98, the ‘net worth’ of the richest 10 percent in the United States stayed fairly steady at 13 times more than the poorest 20 percent. Between 1998 to 2001 the gap shot up to 22.4 times more, and is still rising. Jared Bernstein of the normally sober Economic Policy Institute was shocked. He warned, ‘I think the increase in inequality that’s evident in this report is really pretty alarming. It should really alert those who are thinking about implementing aggressive tax policies.’ Perhaps he was thinking of President George W. Bush, who responded to the alert by cutting taxes on dividends paid by a handful of the American rich who he represents.In Britain the gap is equally horrific, though less dramatically documented. Everyone knows about the poor – nine and a half million homes that can’t afford proper heating, eight million people who can’t afford one or more essential household items like fridges, telephones and carpets, four million who can’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables. The rich are more comfortably protected from statistics – the National Office of Statistics keeps no figures for the richest 1 percent, but everyone accepts that under Blair and Brown the rich and super-rich have sailed off into the stratosphere leaving those impoverished millions in the gutter.Nor is it quite accurate to moan about the divisions between rich and poor countries. Of course, the statistics of that division are shocking, and of course the rich countries gang together in the G8 to make sure the division continues. But the divisions persist, sometimes even more horrifically, in those poor countries too. The World Wealth Report by the US banker Merrill Lynch in 2000 charted the rapid increase in millionaires all over the world, but found the rise sharpest in Asia, a continent made up mainly of desperately poor people.These divisions are a far clearer guide to the world crisis than the rise in terrorism or rogue regimes. Indeed, they explain both. The fact that rogue regimes can continue to dominate their people, or that terrorism seems so attractive to so many of the dispossessed, flows directly from the divisions of wealth and property all over the world. The yawning and ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the masses is the central flaw in the capitalist economic system to which all the world’s leaders, including the rogue regimes, subscribe. Any policy that does not seek to solve that problem is bound to fail. Any war, and particularly an expensive war like the one in Iraq, can only widen those divisions and therefore make things worse.Some people still argue that these divisions can best be healed by the democratic process that obtains in Europe and the US. In the old days of the last century an influential group of people called social democrats argued that with the votes of the masses behind them they could, in their words, achieve a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’. That was the British Labour Party’s official policy in 1973, 1974 (twice) and even (with the word ‘irreversible’ tactfully left out) in 1979. Such a promise is almost unthinkable today. The Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, is now a plaything of the rich. The government’s policies are manacled to the priorities of the rich. The rich have, quite literally, bought their way into the government as firmly as have their corporate colleagues in the US.One result of this abandonment of social democracy has been the decline in democracy itself. If the policies of the competing parties are the same, if Democrat is really the same as Republican and Labour the same as Tory, then what’s the point in voting? The poor, the workers and the dispossessed lose their champions and, quite logically, abstain from voting. A great wailing went up when less than 60 percent of those eligible used their votes in the 2001 general election, but that has been the situation in the US for as long as anyone can remember. If electoral politics gets taken over by the rich, used by the rich for their corruptions and their power games, why should the poor and the workers give credibility to that process with their votes?"
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"content": "One sad result of this sad process has been the decline of socialist ideas. Many Labour supporters conclude from the long series of Labour failures that the original central inspiration of Labour – socialism – was flawed. Exactly the opposite is the case. The central ideas of socialism are reinforced every day by the continuing disaster of capitalist society. The unimaginable corruptions of private enterprise in recent years – Enron, WorldCom, Ahold, Railtrack, Equitable Life, hedge funds, split investment ‘trusts’, the collapse of private pension funds – are all contemporary proof of the case for public enterprise, for a planned economy in place of one cast adrift in a sea of stock-market chaos. Controlled from belowThe growing gap between rich and poor is the clearest possible proof of the need for equality – for a society where people whatever their abilities earn roughly the same. And the hierarchical nature of control and power under capitalism – every discrimination, every arbitrary sacking and arrogant abuse of workers by corporate bullies – shouts out for a society controlled from below, a genuine democracy whose institutions are firmly and irrevocably fixed among the masses. The meteoric decline of social democracy in the last three decades leads many people to believe that such a democracy is idealistic, unobtainable. But the truth is that every time the masses stir themselves for reform, they automatically throw up organisations far more democratic than anything experienced or patronised by parliaments.The notion of a representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives are not only elected but can be instantly recalled by the represented, and where the representatives not only promote policies but carry them out, is as relevant today as it was when it was first put into practice by the Paris Commune 132 years ago. The only certainty about such a democracy is that by its nature it cannot possibly be introduced by fawning parliaments such as the one at Westminster, still less by the lobbyists’ plaything on Capitol Hill in Washington. It can only come from a movement from below.Such a movement is much more easy to understand today than even a year ago. The vast movement against war in Iraq – by far the biggest such movement I have seen even in my long lifetime – shows how many people can and will act when they see their governments acting irresponsibly. Many of those millions of people who have demonstrated against the war feel just as strongly about the way the world and its politics are run by corporations, for profit, for the rich, by exploiting the workers and the poor. They are shocked by the constant examples of capitalist waste, of money and wealth spent on frivolity rather than on meeting the needs of a world pining in pain. A recent meeting of the G8 countries agreed to spend a sum of money on the poor that was only just equivalent to the cost of organising G8 conferences!If the mighty human energy unleashed to contest the war can be directed to organise for socialism and against capitalism, if the power of the people who do the work can be organised against those who profit from it, a real prospect opens up for a new and genuine socialist democracy which can truly liberate the world not just from dictators and weapons of mass destruction but from those who profit from both. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDerry: the grim facts aboutUlster’s divide and rule city ...(21 December 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 102, 21 December 1968, p. 2.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.THE DEMONSTRATIONS which have erupted in Northern Ireland and which, in spite of the sacking of Home Secretary Craig, will almost certainly continue, started in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city.Derry’s predicament sums up the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the Unionist government.Here are some of the facts about the city which cannot be found in government handouts. Sub-StandardHousing. There are approximately 12.000 houses in the city, 40 per cent of which are sub-standard.According to the 1961 census, 45 per cent of the households in the city do not have sole use of hot water; 54 per cent do not have a bath; 16 per cent do not have a kitchen sink.About 1,250 households are in ‘multiple occupation’, sharing household amenities.The Derry Housing Association has seven volumes, incorporating some 1,410 documents of cases of ‘intolerable’ housing conditions. And these are all Catholics.To these have to be added at least another 300 households in the Protestant areas of The Fountain and Waterside, where conditions are no better than in the Catholic slums. OvercrowdingIn 1966,the city’s Medical Officer of Health,who is President of the Apprentice Boys, a high-powered Masonic-type organisation named after the boys who closed the Derry gates against the invading armies in 1688, reported: ‘Overcrowding plays a .arge part in the causation of tuberculosis in the area.’House-building: The Derry Corporation, which is Unionist-controlled, built no houses in 1967. The following table speaks for itself:TownPop.Cncl. Housesbuilt in last5 years*Coleraine13,578336Newry12,214659Portadown20,710535Larne17,278212Limavady 4,811266Londonderry55,681197The rate of house-building in Derry (70 houses per 1,000 people) since the war is the slowest of any housing authority in the United Kingdom.And that’s including the effort of the government-sponsored Northern Ireland Housing Trust,which has done most of the house-building in Derry since 1958.The vote is only available in local elections to ratepayers, that is, householders in separate dwellings. More than a quarter of the adults in Derry (8,400 people) cannot vote.There are three wards: South, North and Waterside.Half the Derry people live in South ward. Nearly all of them are Catholics, who vote eight Nationalists on to the Corporation.In North and Waterside there are small Protestant majorities, who return 12 Unionists. Protestants make up about 25 per cent of the Derry population, but their party controls the Corporation. Turned DownThis delicate balance controls the Corporation’s housing policy.A proposal by Derry Housing Association to build 450 houses in Pennyburn was turned down – for fear of rehousing Catholics in a Protestant area.Similarly, the Protestant slum-dwellers must stay where they are. To move them out to council houses would mean losing valuable votes.Everything is neatly carved up and Unionists and Nationalists don’t bother to fight elections.Elections don’t happen, unless,like last year, for the first time, the Northern Ireland Labour Party intervenes, getting about 30 per cent of the vote in Catholic and Protestant wards.Unemployment is 12.5 per cent in Derry. 17.4 per cent of males are out of work.Unemployment in Northern Ireland depends very much on the religious nature of the area. High and LowDerry is Catholic – so unemployment is high. Belfast is Protestant – so unemployment is relatively low:CatholicTownsUnemploymentRate %Londonderry12.5Newry15.1Strabane16.7Enniskillen17.9Kilkeel20.4ProtestantTowns Belfast 5.5Coleraine 8.8Ballymena 3.1Portadown 3.8Newton 3.7Lurgan 3.5Antrim 2.5 Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootRuth First(January 1988)From Socialist Worker, January 1988.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 157–159.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I imagine there are few socialists in London (or who have recently travelled to London) who have not by now seen A World Apart, the story of Ruth First, as seen through the eyes of her daughter.I fear the film is so very, very good, and its message so powerful, that it may not last long on the screen. So if there is anyone who hasn’t see it – just get down there as soon as possible.There may be some people who are a little puzzled by the final titles which announce that Ruth First was assassinated in Mozambique in 1983. So she was, but the film ends some twenty years earlier, and admirers of Ruth (and there could hardly be any non-admirers alter the film) might be puzzled as to what happened in the interim.During the film Ruth First’s life is all in South Africa, and she died not far away, so you might think that she spent all her life there. She didn’t. Soon after the period covered by the film, she escaped from house arrest and fled to Britain. She was here all through the rest of the 1960s and, I think, all the 1970s. She joined a huge army of South African exiles who made a profound impact on the British Left in those years.Ruth wrote some marvellous books. Her book 117 Days is the finest account I have ever read of the disorientation of the rebel prisoner in a torturer’s prison. Anyone who enjoyed the film should get hold of that book.Unlike many of her friends and contemporaries, Ruth First believed that no progress would ever come to South Africa without armed struggle. I met her often at meetings, which she arranged, of South African guerrillas, trained in armed struggle, who came to London to build support for it. All these people, like Ruth, were members or supporters of the Communist Party. I was always both delighted to be invited, and rather ashamed to find myself (every time) arguing with them. I couldn’t understand why the discussion kept turning back to the governments of the new African states.I remember one furious argument with Ruth about the deposing of Ben Bella in Algeria and his replacement by Boumedienne. She, and the others, regarded this as a great sign of progress. They had the facts to prove it: Boumedienne’s record in struggle, in commitment and in guns.Over the years the same basic argument rocked back and forth. I was told that the Rhodesian armed struggle depended on ‘the friendliness of the front line states’ for its existence. These states, perhaps against their will, behave like bosses towards the people, and as agents for the great companies that carve up Africa. I could not understand the argument that placed these governments above the guerrillas’ own commitment and their own strength.In the end, Ruth First and these brave young men and women wanted a society precisely a world apart from the world run by Kaunda, Nyerere, Boumedienne, Nasser and the rest.Since they wanted something different, since they represented something different, since they were fighting literally to the death for something different, why did they pretend and speak so eloquently for people who represented more of the same?I never got an answer to these questions. On the other hand, to be fair, I never stopped getting the invitations.Ruth First had a sort of grudging respect for the International Socialists (the Socialist Workers Party’s forerunners). She thought that underneath it all we were ‘Trotskyist splitters’, but she did notice that whenever there was a demo or a clash of any kind with apartheid, we were always in the front line.On 14 September 1973 she spoke at a demonstration organized by the IS in Hyde Park. It was to protest against a mine disaster which had killed, I think, twelve African miners as a result of the most appalling employers’ negligence.I remember the date exactly because the disaster happened on the 11th, the same day as the Chilean coup.The Communist Party organized a huge demo on Chile. We guessed wrong and organized one on South Africa. About 600 came to ours, about 20,000 to the other (which we joined rather abjectly, after our meeting was over).In spite of the clash of party loyalties, Ruth First agreed at once to speak on our platform. Before the meeting, we watched the masses forming elsewhere in the park. ‘You made a mistake coming here,’ I laughed at her. ‘No’, she grinned back. ‘I’ll speak at any meeting against racist South Africa. You made the mistake, not I.’For once, I thought, she won the argument. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 September 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootMarx’s real tradition(March 1990)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 129, March 1990.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.THE TUMULTUOUS revolts in Eastern Europe have divided socialists into two camps. In one camp there is gloom and introspection. In the other there is excitement and delight.The two camps represent two different traditions, both calling themselves socialist. For much of the last hundred years or so, these two traditions have become entangled with one another. We had better disentangle them fast, for one tradition is now dead; the other lives. Unless they can free themselves fast, the living will be dragged down by the dead.“Ever since the beginning of time” says a disembodied voice over a spinning globe at the start of Cecil B. de Mille’s Samson and Delilah, “man has striven to achieve a democratic state on earth.” That was probably putting it a little high (especially as the voice went on to assert; “such a man was Samson”), but there is something in it.In all human history, which is the history of exploitation, there have been people who pined or fought for a day when exploitation would cease. Such people wrote Utopias in which men and women lived side by side in freedom, prosperity and peace.Some of these Utopias were in heaven, some were on earth. Their instigators were benevolent men and women who saw themselves as parents leading bemused and discomforted children to a promised land. They were therefore, all of them, elitists, none more so than the French Utopian “socialists” of the early 19th century. They believed their own education, feeling and compassion would usher in the new society.In England the word “socialism” was first popularised by such a man: Robert Owen. Owen detested the exploitation he saw all around him during the industrial revolution. He urged benevolent employers to set up dream factories in which the workers would get clothed, fed, educated and introduced to the fine arts.He didn’t just say it; he did it. If you happen to be near Lanark in Scotland you can go and see the carefully kept result: Owen’s model mill in which most of his ideals were put into effect, without the slightest impact on exploitation in the West of Scotland or anywhere else.New Lanark and all similar Utopias and charities were greeted by the young Karl Marx with the ferocious contempt for which he had a peculiar genius. Marx reckoned that for the first time in history it was possible to end exploitation once and for all. Up to that time, so little was produced that there wasn’t enough to share with everyone. If there was to be any progress, therefore, a surplus had to be creamed off by a ruling class.After the advances of production in the Industrial Revolution there was enough to go round. It was possible to talk (as they started to do in Germany only from 1842, when Marx was 24) of “socialism”, a society where things are produced and distributed socially, to fit everyone’s needs, and in which it is considered a crime for one person to grow rich from the labour of another.How could such a society come about? Was it inevitable because it was so obviously fair and decent? Were industrialists, landlords, bankers suddenly to be struck, as St Paul pretended he was on the road to Damascus, by a blinding light which would show them how monstrous their riches were in the midst of so much poverty? FROM a very early age, Marx recognised the ruthlessness of class rule. He observed how the ruling class behaved like vampires. They sucked blood, which led them to be thirsty for more of it. They were as impervious as vampires to pleas for mercy.They would relinquish their surplus, he concluded, only when it was siezed from them by the very class they robbed.So the first reason why Marx reviled all collaborators with the capitalist system is that they made the abolition of that system and the creation of a socialist society more distant and difficult.There was however a second reason, which was even more important to Marx and to his friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels. They were faced by an argument which we hear on all sides today. “The working class” they were told “are backward, ill-educated, racialist, dirty, mean. How can such a class create a new society free from exploitation and fear?”Marx reacted angrily to such abuse. His descriptions, for instance, of the meetings of workers in Paris when he was first exiled there in the mid-1840s, are full of admiration. But he knew that exploiting society makes wretches of the exploited just as it makes monsters of the exploiters.He knew that centuries of exploitation had left the masses full of, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. And this was the best reason of all for the revolution.“This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”That was in the German Ideology, written in 1847, when Marx was 29; and the theme – the importance of the self-emancipation of the working class – goes on and on throughout all his writing. It is the very lynch-pin of Marxism."
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"content": "When in 1864 he wrote the principles of the First International Working Men’s Association his very first clause said: “Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves ...” This clause was written into the membership cards of every member of the International. Seven years after the formation of the International the workers of Paris rose, threw off the muck of ages, and set up their own administration entirely free from exploitation. Marx, in a fever of excitement and enthusiasm, wrote perhaps the most powerful political pamphlet in all history, insisting that the Commune’s greatest achievement was the self-emancipation of the working class:“They have taken the actual management of the revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the people itself; displacing the state machinery of the ruling class by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime!”The most consistent theme of all Marx’s writing is this zest for the potential of the working class in struggle. It goes back to the very earliest of Marx’s ideas, when as a young journalist he called himself an “extreme democrat”.Vulgar Marxists of the bureaucratic school (“Marxists” whom Marx and Engels came to despise while they were alive) detect a “great shift” from Marx’s early idealistic journalism to his later scientific work. It is not a shift which Marx recognised. Rather, he noticed that he developed logically from a passionate belief in democracy to a passionate belief in communism.Communism, brought about by a working class in motion, was the most democratic society conceivable, since it came about through democratic action and it removed the most undemocratic aspect of all: economic exploitation of the many by the few. By as early as 1845, Frederick Engels was spelling this out in simple language:“Democracy nowadays is communism ... Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses ... The proletarian parties are entirely right in inscribing the word ‘democracy’ on their banners.” THE DEMOCRATIC inspiration and the belief in self-emancipation (which are part of the same thing) are the essentials of Marxism. Without them, all the carefully constructed economics, all the earnest philosophy wither on the vine.The spirit of a revolt, the need for a class battle against exploitation – these are the antidotes to the determinism of which Marx was so often accused.The famous statement that people make their own history but they do not make it as they choose is usually quoted by Marxists with the accent on everything after “but”. In fact, the emphasis in the sentence is that men and women determine what happens to them. The point that they have to work within historical circumstances laid down for them is made only to ensure that they fight more effectively.Not long after Marx died (in 1883) a new threat arose to the fight which he believed would soon be won. Men calling themselves Marxists found themselves at the head of “great labour movements”, vast trade unions, socialist newspapers, socialist sporting societies.Such men started to wonder whether all this talk of revolution wasn’t going over the top. They felt they might get to positions of power and influence through the newly-granted franchise, and that when they did so they could legislate for socialism without having to go through messy and probably bloody revolution.Thus, at the end of the 1890s, Edward Bernstein, like countless others after him, proposed to the masses that their world could be improved gradually and peacefully. All they needed to do was vote in a secret ballot. For Bernstein (and for Karl Kautsky, though few noticed his backsliding at this stage) the idea of millions of workers emancipating themselves in the streets and factories was faintly distasteful, if not downright dangerous.The works of these men (except on the fringes: Bernstein, perhaps, on Cromwell; Kautsky on Christianity) do not survive with any relevance today. What does survive is the furious reply delivered to Bernstein and company by the Polish-born revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg.Her reply came in two parts: Social Reform or Revolution (1900) and The Mass Strike (1906). The common theme of both pamphlets, the element which lifts them above all other contemporary political writing and makes them so important today, is the “living political school”, “the pulsating flesh and blood”, the “foaming wave” of the working class in struggle.Luxemburg fought like a tiger for Karl Marx’s central principle: that the workers can only be emancipated if they themselves overthrow capitalist society. She exulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution which in a few weeks knocked out an absolutism which had reigned unchecked (in spite of all sorts of benevolent reformers who tried to make it better) for centuries. She rejoiced from her prison cell at the Russian Revolution of 1917.The Russian revolutionary socialists more than anyone else in all history understood Marx’s insistence on self-emancipation. Where Marx had called for it and encouraged it, they carried it out.Reactionary historians and commentators tell us that the tight discipline of the Bolshevik Party made it an undemocratic organisation dedicated to commanding the workers, not representing them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Bolshevik Party won its soviet majorities in the spring and summer of 1917 precisely because it took its stand on the strength, confidence and potential of the Russian workers. In State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution And The Renegade Kautsky, Lenin fulminated against parliamentary democracy because it was not democratic enough. It left the capitalist machine intact. It removed working class representatives from the cooperative atmosphere of everyday life in factories, mills, mines and offices. "
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"content": "LENIN, in State and Revolution restated his belief in the “elective principle” as the cornerstone of any new socialist society. He repeated again and again in the months and years after October that the working class which had emancipated itself was the only hope for the Revolution. “I calculated’’ he said “solely and exclusively on the workers, soldiers and peasants being able to tackle better than the officials, better than the police, the practical and difficult problems of increasing the production of foodstuffs and their better distribution, the better provision of soldiers, etc. etc.”.He told the First All Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918:“In introducing workers’ control we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – changes from below: we wanted the workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.”Lenin’s inspiration, if less flamboyant, was exactly the same as Marx’s and Luxemburg’s. Their socialism depended on the exploitative society being overthrown in struggle by the workers. Lenin realised, therefore, that without the revolutionary class of self-emancipated workers, the revolution would, in his own words, “perish”.Perish it did, for precisely that reason. The self-emancipators, the small Russian working class, were annihilated in war and famine. By 1921 all that was left of them was the top layer, the bureaucracy of revolutionaries without the class which put it there.The self-emancipators were replaced by workers from the countryside who had not emancipated themselves or anyone else. The revolution in Germany was defeated. In Britain it never started. Russia was isolated; its revolutionary inspiration snuffed out. The revolution was lost. Soviet democracy was replaced by state capitalist tyranny.Sad to say, most socialists and communists throughout the world did not notice that it was lost at all. Almost imperceptibly, communists who had been brought up to believe that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class became idol-worshippers in the old Utopian tradition; falling at the feet of Stalin as the benevolent Father of Socialism.In the name of Marxism, the very essence of Marxism, its democratic and self-emancipatory spirit, was at first forgotten, later ridiculed and condemned. Dictatorship over the proletariat was hailed as dictatorship of the proletariat. Murdering opponents was hailed as democratic discipline. Communism and democracy, synonymous for Engels, became exact opposites for Stalinists.More predictably anti-communists made the same mistake. They said there was a direct line from Lenin to Stalin; that all revolutions somehow end in tyranny. The answer to them is a simple one.For all his myriad fetishes, racism and pettiness, Stalin bent his dictatorship to one central purpose: to squeeze out of Russia every single surviving breath of the Revolution. He killed all his former Bolshevik colleagues – save Lenin who died early enough to be turned (against everything he had ever believed) into another icon. Revolutionary decrees were repealed and replaced with their opposites.Factory control was replaced by one-man management; educational reform by educational reaction; internationalism by nationalism and racism; free abortions by rigid abortion controls. The death penalty for serious crimes, abolished by the revolution, was re-imposed. Privileges, domestic servants and all the paraphernalia of ruling class “superiority” were the order of the day.All this was heralded throughout the world as socialism – though the essence of socialism, Lenin’s control from below, had been turned into its very opposite, control from above.After the Second World War, the tragedy repeated itself, as Marx would have said, this time as farce. In the carve-up of the victorious powers, Russia swiped six countries in Eastern Europe. In none of these had the working class emancipated itself. Their emancipation, instead, was imposed by Russian bayonets.Replicas of Stalin’s state capitalist tyranny were set up in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and East Germany. The workers played no part in any of these governments. They did not even have the right to vote them out, as their fellow workers had in much of the West. Resistance of any kind, especially resistance in the workplaces, was met with the most horrific repression. Uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany were put down by tanks.The economies were bent and corrupted to the sustenance of Great Russian imperialism. Ruling class bureaucracies set themselves up in Stalin’s image.The countries came to be known as “socialist countries”. Either their relationship with Russia, or their centralised “planned” economies or their stuffed-shirted socialist rhetoric convinced hundreds of thousands of socialists in other countries that, at root, they were socialist. The word caught on in the Eastern European countries themselves, but with a different result.In those countries, where the workers knew that they were being dragooned and terrorised, socialism became a synonym for brutal dictatorship and exploitation. Socialism, the great emancipation, became the word for slavery. And the revolt against that tyranny, when it came, and when it was led, as it inevitably had to be, by the working class, turned first and most viciously against anything which called itself “socialist”. NOW LARGE numbers of socialists, who spent much of their lives in some posture of obeisance to these “socialist countries” are fleeing the field.Some of them are giving up all political commitment. Some, very few, place their faith in the “revolution from above” which they imagine has been set in motion, single-handedly by Mikhail Gorbachev. Others, probably the majority, have abandoned any talk of revolution, and now work for “reform from above” in the Labour Party and its equivalents.The world in which we live is not in its essentials any different from the world which Marx described. It is still run on exploitative lines. A degenerate and cancerous capitalism still gnaws away at the lives of most of the world’s people. There is no sign that “reform from above” worries it even for a moment. It flicks aside the reformers with the same casual cynicism which Marx exposed."
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"content": "The chief difference is that the working class, which still carries the hopes of change, is much bigger now than it was in Marx’s day. While sophisticated commentators insist that the working class is vanishing, it is growing by hundreds of thousands every year and by millions every decade. Russia herself now has sixty million exploited industrial workers: China over one hundred million and among the teeming, hungry masses of what was until recently known as the Third World, new robust organisations are arising, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted “like Venus from the foam”.The events in Eastern Europe have proved like nothing else in the last 50 years that sudden volcanic social change does not happen when stockbrokers forecast it or academics work it out. It comes when the masses move, seek to emancipate themselves and in the process, in Marx’s famous phrase, “educate themselves, the educators”.Dictators and bureaucracies can call themselves socialists for so long. In the end, the actions of the masses will sort them out, and start once more to reveal things as they are. An industrial economy which is “planned” in the interests of a militaristic and parasitic minority is not socialist. It is its opposite: state capitalist.If state capitalism is being “conquered” by the masses emancipating themselves, then those same masses have blazed a path towards the conquering of all capitalism.The urgent need for socialists is to kick the rotten corpse of state capitalism away from Rosa’s “living school” of self-emancipatory socialism; to assert as aggressively as ever the socialist tradition which started with Marx and Engels, and was taken on by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian revolutionaries, and by a small band of socialists who knew all along that socialism and democracy are synonymous, that neither can ever exist without the other, and that both can only be achieved when the exploited masses use their irresistible power. Top of the pageLast updated on 12.8.2013"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootArmed and dangerous(March 1996)From Socialist Review, No. 195, March 1996, pp. 8–9.Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Arguments about whether ministers should resign are not the main point of the Scott Report, says Paul Foot. The real dynamite is in the connection between government and the arms industry – and the level of deception involvedSo prolonged and extensive was the hype which heralded the Scott Report that an anti-climax was almost inevitable. The government’s approach to the report of the inquiry, which it set up itself, was twofold. Before the report came out, a mighty chorus of former ministers, led by former foreign secretaries Howe and Hurd, claimed that the inquiry had been ‘unfair’ and ‘flawed’. Senior ministers like themselves, they protested, had been asked questions which they had been given beforehand without lawyers to represent them! This was, they claimed, an interference with the inalienable rights of former ministers! On and on droned this chorus as the government braced itself for the report’s publication.When they eventually agreed to let the public read it, they released their own ‘press pack’ which was every bit as deceptive as any deception exposed in the report. The ‘press pack’ extracted the (few) sections in the report which were favourable to the government, and presented them as a fair summary. This worked a treat on the hacks in the government press (the Sun, Express, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Times etc.) all of whom concluded that there was no case at all for resignations. The Scott Report was then savaged in the same newspapers by journalists like former Times editor Simon Jenkins – who forgot to mention his long and close friendship with William Waldegrave, the minister most at risk from Scott’s revelations. Because the million word report was issued at 3.30 p.m. and could not possibly be read in full for at least two days after that, government ministers calculated that their own summary and the legendary laziness of their press toadies would enable them to ride out the storm.The ruse worked pretty well for a day or two but as more and more people read the report the awful truth began to sink in – that again and again, and in the most meticulous detail, Scott exposes government hypocrisy and deception on a grand scale. The basic political deception (which emerges much more clearly from the report than I had imagined) was the so-called ‘tilt to Iraq’.Most people who have studied the matter know that the US and British governments ‘tilted’ to Iraq during the latter stages of the long and murderous Iran/Iraq war of 1980–1988. The Scott Report pushes the tilt back to the very start of the war. As Scott’s figures for military and civilian trade decisively prove, Iraq was favourite from the outset. It follows that ministers’ insistence on their impartiality in the conflict – the foundation stone of their declared policy on defence sales – was sheer hypocrisy.The clearest example of that hypocrisy was the approach of the Export Credits Guarantee Department, which guarantees British exports. From 1985, the ECGD guaranteed the sale of defence equipment to Iraq to the tune of at least £25m a year. No such guarantee was available for Iran. In 1988, when the war ended, the guarantee for Iraq was quadrupled – to £100m. The chief secretary to the treasury who approved that huge leap (and denied any similar facility to Iran) was John Major, the man who has consistently pretended that he knew little or nothing of the arms to Iraq scandal while he was chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary and prime minister.In two other sections, the report exposes the central government hypocrisy – that arms to Iraq were carefully restricted throughout the period. First, all sorts of weaponry, often of the most lethal kind, got to Iraq from Britain through ‘diversionary routes’, chiefly through Jordan. Arms sales from Britain to Jordan were 3,000 percent (about £500 million) higher in the 1980s than in the 1970s. This had nothing to do with the expansion of the Jordanian armed forces, which were actually contracting in the 1980s. Almost all the extra weaponry went on to Iraq, and there were other conduits too: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Portugal, Singapore, Austria.Secondly, the ‘restricted’ policy became much less restricted for Iraq after the ceasefire of 1988. The entire British government was tempted by the honeypot which was opened up by Saddam Hussein as he expanded his vast armed forces after the peace treaty with Iran in 1988. The guidelines were changed to liberate a whole new category of defence sales, and no one was told about it.The effect of the change was further to expand the close friendship between the British government and that of Saddam Hussein. In July 1990, a cabinet meeting chaired by Douglas Hurd agreed to scrap all remaining restrictions on arms sales to Iraq. But before the ministers’ policy could be put into effect, their beloved ally Saddam Hussein wrecked everything by invading Kuwait. The policy of selling all arms to Iraq was rather hurriedly and nervously changed to selling no arms to Iraq.Most people, including the Labour Party, believe that the most important part of Scott’s work dealt with the Matrix Churchill trial in which ‘innocent men were nearly sent to prison because the government didn’t reveal the truth’. Socialists should beware this formulation. The directors of Matrix Churchill were merchants of death who knew perfectly well that the machine tools they were selling to their Iraqi customers were to be used for weapons, including nuclear weapons. They were not innocent men like the Birmingham Six or the Bridgewater Four. They were not framed for something they didn’t do. Their only defence was that the government knew what they were doing and let them do it, partly because ministers shared their intrinsic capitalist belief in the right to sell arms for a profit, partly because intelligence spooks liked to play silly secret spy games with the exporters."
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"content": "All that happened here was that HM Customs tried to enforce government policy restricting arms to Iraq while the government and the manufacturers were defying that policy. This led, naturally, to a balls-up which the government tried to cover up by denying defence lawyers the information about their own complicity in a conspiracy to defy their own policy. This is the reason why, for the first time ever in a criminal trial, ministers were asked to sign ‘gagging orders’ to keep the information from the defence, and happily did so. Only Michael Heseltine had any doubts about signing, and he signed in the end.What attitude should socialists take to the Scott Report? obviously, they will want to resist and expose the frantic efforts of ministers to play it down and denigrate it. On the other extreme, however, some anti-government politicians and papers have presented the report as a whitewash. The Observer’s headline on the subject was ‘How Scott was nobbled’. The theory here is that Scott was ‘got at’ and agreed to ‘water down’ his report. There is no evidence of this, however. The leaked drafts of the report are strikingly similar to the final version.The misapprehension in the ‘Scott was nobbled’ camp arises from impatience and outrage that the judge did not overtly condemn the government and the ministers responsible for serial hypocrisy and deception. This in turn derives from the belief that a high court judge will approach these matters like any ordinary rational citizen. The idea, however, that any judge will openly condemn a Tory prime minister, especially a serving one, is plainly absurd. just as judges expect deference from their minions, they are deferential to their political masters.There were therefore always clear limits to what Scott would say. His attitude, for instance, to Thatcher and to Major is positively obsequious. He swallows wholesale the fantastic notion that Lady Thatcher, the most interventionist prime minister in modern times, who was fascinated above all other things by arms sales and intelligence matters, did not know that three junior ministers, all of whom worshipped or feared her, changed the whole policy of defence sales to Iraq without her ever hearing of it. Major too, according to Scott, knew nothing about anything, and gets off on that score.But that is nowhere near the end of the story. Within the obvious limits which any socialist could have defined long before the report came out, Scott has applied himself with great care, considerable skill and determination to unravelling the mountains of secret information made available to him. It is this flow of information which makes the Scott inquiry unique.There has been, quite literally, nothing like it before, and the result is an exposé of the way British government works which is vital to anyone who is interested in these matters, and, for those of us who challenge the notion that parliamentary democracy is democratic enough, invaluable. Over and over again, in almost every single instance he investigates, Scott shows how the civil service and the politicians, either together or separately, combined to deceive the public about what really went on. Though of course he does not spell it out, the basic purpose of that secrecy emerges quite clearly.The entire machinery of the two major ministries most closely involved, trade and industry and defence, was organised to assist the arms companies. The attempts of the foreign office to control this ‘gung-ho’ approach in no way made the system any more democratic. For instance one of the main reasons why the foreign office was keen to restrict arms sales to Iraq and Iran was subservience to the government of Saudi Arabia, which was nervous of both Iran and Iraq and with whom the arms companies had far more lucrative business than anything likely to emerge from all the other Gulf states put together. So even the conflicts between the ‘restricters’ and the ‘let-it-all-go’ brigade were part of the same problem.Parliamentary democracy was useful to the arms sellers as long as it legitimised them. If it ever threatened to expose them, or, worse, to provide damaging information about what they were doing, the entire democratic procedure of parliament was brushed aside. The liberal Scott was shocked by this. ‘Why not tell people what you are doing and have a debate about it?’ he kept asking officials and ministers. Their answers were always evasive and unsatisfactory, partly because the real answer (‘We do things for ourselves, our class, our profit’) could not be spelled out. The fact that Scott, unsurprisingly, kneels to prime ministers and avoids spelling out the full force of his own investigation should in no way deflect from this enormous indictment, which, I predict, we will go on quoting extensively for as long as the system it indicts survives. Top of the pageLast updated on 8 November 2019"
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"content": "<Paul Foot: Heath’s new race bid (1 February 1969)MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHeath’s new race bid(1 February 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 107, 1 February 1969, p. 1.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.TORY LEADER Edward Heath made another bid in the new political game which is fascinating commentators at Westminster: The Immigration Auction Game.There are no rules. The prize – estimated at approximately one million votes – goes to the man who can declare the strictest control of coloured immigration as the policy of his party by the next election.There was, before 1968, a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in which no one could overbid by too big a margin.This agreement was broken by Enoch Powell.Now Heath is hopelessly trying to keep up by demanding that the government introduce tougher controls on dependents and ‘reserves the right’ to ban all immigrants ‘if the situation arises’.The bold Labour government has responded immediately by withdrawing the concession of entry for fiancees of immigrants already here.Powell, with the help of Nazi Colin Jordan’s bestselling sticker Powell was Right, is winning all, down the line.None of this has anything to do with the real situation, even the capitalist situation. The number of dependents of coloured immigrants is already declining as the tough controls of August 1965 start to bite.The number of immigrant workers coming in is now down to 4,000 a year. Almost all of these are skilled or professional people.Capitalism, in short, is not threatened in the least degree by immigration. The immigration auction game is restricted entirely to opportunists, men who care for nothing whatever except winning racialist votes.That appears to include almost everyone active in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Top of the pageLast updated on 26 October 2020"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootIcon, icon in the wall ...(15 July 1989)From Socialist Worker, 15 July 1989.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 22–24.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.What makes an icon out of an iconoclast?Perhaps the greatest iconoclast of all time was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He was an incurable atheist before the Russian Revolution and after it. He went to extravagant lengths to make sure no one in the new revolutionary leadership of Russia was worshipped while alive or when dead.He observed how hierarchical class society indulged in unashamed ancestor worship. Ruling class mandarins became infatuated with the terror of death. Many could not believe that they would ever die, but they compensated for their mortality by fantastic rituals after death.Their religions reassured them that in some way or other their soul or spirit would live on in even greater glory than on earth. To make sure of it they embalmed, buried or entombed each other’s dead bodies in grandiloquent ceremonies.As the acknowledged leader of revolutionary Russia, Lenin insisted on living the life of an ordinary citizen, wholly unadorned with pomp or ceremony. He wrote and spoke often about the importance of a secular approach to life and death and castigated the very notion that the dead were in any way at all more important than the living. WorshipWhen he died in 1924, a furious argument broke out among his followers about what should be done with his body. The immediate, Leninist reaction was published in Pravda: ‘We must not venerate the corpse of Comrade Lenin, but his cause.’This was the standard Bolshevik view argued vociferously by Trotsky and Bukharin. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, pleaded: ‘Don’t make an icon out of Ilyich.’It seemed for a day or two that this conventional Leninist view would prevail. But the Communist Party had already slipped into the hands of Stalin and his allies. They unleashed an orgy of adoration for the dead hero.‘Under no circumstances can we give to the earth such a great and intensely beloved leader as Ilyich’, argued one leader in the Moscow newspaper Rabochaya Moskva. ‘We suggest his remains be embalmed and left under glass for hundreds of years.’Stalin agreed. As Lenin’s will proved, Lenin himself had been extremely suspicious of Stalin in the early 1920s. Above all, Lenin was disgusted by Stalin’s religiosity. Stalin loved ornaments, symbols, icons. He believed people should worship their leaders.He set to work with consummate skill to turn the Russian people’s love and respect for Lenin into post-mortem corpse worship. He set up a body, horribly entitled the Immortalisation Commission, which threw up a makeshift mausoleum into which Lenin’s embalmed body was moved only six days after his death.In 1930 it was moved into the great granite monstrosity where it has been ever since (except for a break during the war when, in fear of invasion, it was moved with great difficulty and expense to a safe hiding place in the Urals). GlasnostThere, millions of people from all over the world have come to pay their respects to the mummified and petrified body of a man whose whole life was dedicated to the ending of mummification and petrification. Only a handful of ‘splitters and sectarians’ were suitably disgusted.Now that more and more Russians are beginning to think for themselves, one or two people who imagine that glasnost means what it says have expressed doubts about the whole ghastly business, and even suggested that poor old Lenin might be afforded the humble burial or cremation he would have wanted.Not many weeks ago Mark Zakharov, director of the Leninsky Komosol theatre, went on an increasingly popular late night television show called Vzglyad. No matter how much we hate or love a person,’ he said mildly, ‘we don’t have the right to deprive him of burial.’How did this very moderate and unsuperstitious idea go down with the unsuperstitious moderates who, we are told, run Russia today? It was immediately ostracised and denounced in terms of which Stalin would have been proud. AdviceA former political commentator, Georgi A. Zhukov, asked: ‘Why is our state television tolerating such statements?’ The party leader in Vladimir, Ratmir S. Bobovikov, described any argument at all about whether to downgrade Lenin’s body to the miserable status of that of any other mortal as ‘simply immoral’.However much ‘freedom’ is being introduced into the Russian system, its rulers know perfectly well that the icon Lenin is of much more use to them than the iconoclast Lenin. They need Lenin as a symbol of hierarchy and immortality more than ever before.For them the great advantage of having Lenin embalmed and worshipped is that it deflects his adorers from reading him, understanding him and, worst of all, acting on his advice. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootTribunes and the people(January 1990)From Theatre Reviews, Socialist Worker Review, No.127, January 1990, pp.27-28.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Coriolanus“SHAKESPEARE was a Tory without any doubt”. Thus Nigel Lawson, in what must rank as one of the Great Asininities of the 1980s, in an interview in the Guardian in September 1983. Asked to explain himself Mr Lawson slid into characteristic incoherence:“I think that in Coriolanus the Tory virtues, the Roman virtues as mediated through Shakespeare are ... it’s written from a Tory point of view.”In milder and more coherent prose, William Hazlitt, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean critic of all time, tended to the Lawson view:“Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps for some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of bating the rabble.”In their different ways, Lawson and Hazlitt are both wrong. But from the productions of Coriolanus I have seen over the last 30 years, it is easy to see how anyone could come to that conclusion.The productions without exception have featured Coriolanus as a hero, the citizens as dupes, and the tribunes as self-serving hypocrites.This was true of the Coriolanus played by Laurence Olivier (1959), Alan Howard (1977), Ian McKellen (1986) and now Charles Dance.The present Royal Shakespeare production by Terry Hands seems to me even worse than his former effort in 1977: and that was unpolitical enough.The Coriolanus Shakespeare wrote is something completely different to the stiff, unbalanced and unconvincing play which is constantly produced in our theatres.Any socialist who goes to see Coriolanus must get seated early and listen, for the first few exchanges of the first scene of the first act lay the foundation stone for the entire play. The stage direction is apt:“Enter a company of mutinous citizens, with staves, clubs and other weapons.”In Terry Hands’ production the citizens are all dressed up in the same silly black uniforms. They are easily convertible into a mob. But in Shakespeare’s text each citizen has a character, and a separate argument.The first citizen takes the lead at once and proclaims: “We are all resolv’d rather to die than to famish”. With this agreed, he goes to the second proposition: “Caius Martius is chief enemy of the people”. There then follows a summary of the attitude of the Roman ruling class of the time which is not all that different from the British ruling class today.“If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear; the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread not in thirst for revenge.”Immediately, the second citizen argues with the general view, pointing out Martius’s services to the country, and demanding: “Nay, speak not maliciously.” The argument goes on for a bit until the patrician Menenius arrives to stop the rebellion.Menenius certainly was a Tory, not so much a Thatcher or a Lawson as a Whitelaw or a Macmillan, offering nice words and boring little homilies to the plebs he detests.His chief opponent in the argument which immediately follows is the second citizen, the one who previously had doubts about so rash a course. When Menenius claims the senate cares for the people, the second citizen explodes in fury:“Care for us? True indeed, they ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeat daily any wholesome act established against the rich and provide more piercing states daily to chain up and restrain the poor ...”Menenius tries to argue against this with a pleasing enough little metaphor about the limbs in mutiny against the belly which provides the nourishment for the limbs, but he is not very persuasive. And now, very early on in this first act, Caius Martius strides onto the stage, apparently justifying everything the citizens say about him with his first sentence:“What’s the matter you dissentious rogues that rubbing the poor itch of your opinion make yourself scabs?”He then delivers himself of the first of his many diatribes against the common people, calling them in quick succession, curs, geese and hares. He is beside himself with rage because he has just come from the Senate where they have made some concessions to the popular upsurge, granted slight reductions in corn prices and even agreed to the appointment of peoples’ tribunes. Shouts Caius:“The rabble should have first unroof’d the city ere some prevailed with me. It will in time win upon power, and throw forth greater themes for insurrection’s arguing.”He is against all concessions and would even take on all the demonstrators with his sword, had not a messenger suddenly announced the declaration of war with a neighbouring tribe, the Volsces. Martius immediately rushes off to war to become a great general and cover himself with blood and glory. One reason he loves war so much is that it provides plenty of opportunities to rid Rome and the patricians of “our musty superfluity” by which he means the poor and the unemployed.Back comes Martius from the conquered city of the Volsces, Corioles, to be acclaimed Coriolanus, and to seek the all-powerful post of consul. To do that, he must go through certain ceremonies to show his love for the people. He must appear in humble clothes in the market place, speak to the people and, if they ask, show them his wounds. He despises this ritual."
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"content": "The fascination in his character lies not so much in his personal pride, which is prodigious, but in his inability to accept the advice of the Whitelaws and the Macmillans around him; to be nice to the people in order more effectively to rob them. He can’t stand being nice to them. He hates their working clothes, their stinking breath, their vulgar accents. Above all he hates the tribunes, who come from his class but have agreed to represent another one.The tribunes know perfectly well what Coriolanus is. He is (the word is apposite since it has Roman roots) a fascist. If he becomes consul, they reflect, “our office may, during his power, go sleep.”They therefore argue with the people to reject Coriolanus as consul. In the modern British theatre these scenes are always produced with a heavy bias towards Coriolanus. The tribunes are shown to incite the people against their will and better judgement. Once again, the text is different. The conversation between the tribunes and the citizens immediately after the “humble pie” scene in the market place goes like this.Sicinius (tribune): How now my masters have you chose this man?First Citizen: He has our voices, Sir.Brutus (tribune): We pray the Gods he may deserve your loves.Second Citizen: Amen, Sir. To my poor unworthy notice, he mocked us when he begged our voices.Third Citizen: Certainly, he flouted us outright.Once more there is an argument. The First Citizen, who was the agitator in the first scene, now takes up the cause of moderation.First Citizen: No, ’tis his kind of speech, he did not mock us.Second Citizen: Not one amongst us, save yourself, but he says he used us scornfully. He should have showed us his marks of merit, wounds received for’s country.Sicinius (tribune): Why so he did, I’m sure.Citizens: No, no; no man saw them.The citizens are disgusted by Coriolanus before even a tribune speaks a bad word of him. It is only then that the tribunes bring to bear the political arguments which, in the light of Coriolanus’s contemptuous behaviour and his record, are extremely serious ones.The best arguments come from Brutus. In Hands’ production these arguments are screamed and spat at the crowd as though the very decibel count would force them into the minds of the mob. In the text, though, they are powerful arguments about the advancing dictatorship:“When he had no powerBut he was a petty servant to the state,He was your enemy, ever spake againstYour liberties and the charters that you bearI’ the body of the weal ...”and again a bit later on:“Did you perceive,He did solicit you in free contemptWhen he did need your loves: and do you thinkThat his contempt shall not be bruising to youWhen he hath power to crush?”This is the argument used to incite people to action against coming tyranny. In the Paris Commune, for instance, the militants argued for the bloody hand to avoid the severed hand; for the terror of the many against the incomparably more horrible terror of the few.The people respond, reject Martius for consul and, as he makes more and more angry noises against them, threaten to kill him. This threat is withdrawn by advice of the tribunes.Eventually, as the play heaves back and forth from class to class, the tribunes decide on a compromise – banishment – which, like so many compromises since proves disastrous to them and the people.The people are not the collection of fickle idiots and their tribunes are not the screeching hypocrites which appear in Hands’s latest production, and all the other prestigious productions of recent times. The people have a case, and they argue it sensibly between them. The tribunes have a very strong argument, and they put it straight to the people they represent.When a senator asks if they intend “to unbuild the city and to lay all flat”, they answer with a great shout: “the people are the city.”This is not to pretend, Dave Spart-like, that Coriolanus is a revolutionary play against the fascist menace. That would be as ridiculous an interpretation as is the fashionable Lawson view. The people can be fickle: they do switch from side to side to side. They are as likely to murder a king as to worship him. Equally, their representatives are more likely to guard their own backsides than to fight for others of a different class.Coriolanus is a complex character, who gets our sympathy for his hatred of hypocrisy as much as he earns our contempt for his contempt of the common people.This is probably the best political play ever written, precisely because it shifts and moves between arguments and counter-arguments not of dummies and stereotypes but of real human beings.Shakespeare knew well enough from his own life experiences (the biggest Midlands riots against the enclosures took place not far from where he was born) that the people had a case. He was also nervous, as almost everyone is, of what may happen if the class born to rule and used to rule is suddenly toppled from power.It is utterly ruinous of the play to take one side and its delicate balances against the other, to glorify the excesses of Coriolanus or to make imbeciles of the tribunes, as this most recent production has done.Bertolt Brecht loved Coriolanus more than any other play. He spent hours with it, rehearsing it, adapting it and even rewriting it to make sure the people had a proper say. In the end he admitted he could not improve on the original. What a tragedy it is that to please the likes of Nigel Lawson so many modern producers of Coriolanus do not learn the same lesson. Top of the pageLast updated on 17.1.2005"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWhy you should be a socialist... the case for the new Socialist Workers Party(1977)Published by the Socialist Workers Party, London 1987.Cartoons by Phil Evans.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Chapter 1THE GROWING WRATHWhat is going wrong? Why are things getting worse? Why can we afford less? Why are we producing less? Are we living beyond our means?Chapter 2CAPITALISM – CLASS AND CRISISWho has to make sacrifices and why? Why are there people unemployed? Who causes economic crisis? Can we afford rich people?Chapter 3WHAT WOULD YOU PUT IN ITS PLACE?What is socialism? Will it work? What about human nature? Will we all be like battery hens?Chapter 4LABOUR’S PARLIAMENTARY ROAD – TO NOWHEREOn how the Labour Party set out on the parliamentary road to socialism – and found it led in the opposite direction.Chapter 5KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS: THE TRADE UNION LEADERSCan our trade union leaders lead us to a better world? Why are they always so distant from us? Why do they support wage freezes and cuts?Chapter 6WHAT ABOUT RUSSIA?Is Russia socialist? Was the Russian revolution socialist? How was the revolution lost? Can you have socialism in one country? Is the Communist Party travelling towards socialism?Chapter 7THE CHALLENGE OF THE RANK AND FILECan the workers make a revolution? Aren’t they backward and apathetic?Chapter 8WANTED – A NEW SOCIALIST PARTYWhy is it wanted? What does it do? Doesn’t it lead to more bureaucracy? What socialist grouping can build a real socialist party? Where and how do you join? Top of the pageLast updated on 19 August 2016"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootTen things everyone should knowabout the Labour Party(October 1994)From Socialist Review, No. 179, October 1994, p. 9.Copyright © 1994 Socialist ReviewDownloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Labour, which is linked to organised workers, is better at any time than the Tories, who are linked to organised capital. ‘Without struggle there is no progress’: everything worth winning by the workers and the dispossessed has to be fought for. The less Labour fights the Tories, the less it is likely to beat them at the polls or anywhere else. The more Labour compromises and prevaricates, the more the fighting spirit of the people who vote Labour is dampened. The more that fighting spirit is dampened, the stronger and more confident grow employers, racialists and reactionaries of every description. The power of the elected parliament is all the time frustrated by the power of the undemocratic banks, corporations, judges and the media. The more a Labour government tries to be fair to the banks, corporations, judges or media, the more it becomes their captive. The more it becomes their captive, the more it attacks the people who vote Labour, thus ensuring a Labour defeat next time. This vicious circle is written into the history of the whole century. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson couldn’t avoid it. There’s no chance that Blair and Co, further to the right even than Attlee and Wilson, will avoid it either. (Conclusion) Vote Labour, but keep up the fight down below to build the resistance into a force which is strong enough to dictate to the undemocratic elite at the top of society – and put an end to their interminable dictatorship. Top of the pageLast updated on 25 April 2017"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootGlamorising an atrocity(11 November 1989)From Socialist Worker, 11 November 1989.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 215–216.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I was trying to concentrate on what Nigel Lawson was saying to Brian Walden last Sunday, but I kept being put off by the fact that both men were wearing poppies.Not long ago, I was asked to go in for an interview on early morning television. I had to turn up at half past five in the morning.Hardly had I arrived than I was whisked into ‘make up’, where I was puffed and prettied for a few moments. I was then handed a poppy and told to stick it in my lapel. ‘We’re all wearing poppies today,’ a young woman said brightly. She was very upset when I replied that I was not wearing any poppy, then or at any other time.She rushed out of the room and appeared soon afterwards with the producer of the programme. He explained that it was decided as a matter of policy that all interviewees that morning (I suppose it was 11 November) should wear poppies in their jackets.I said I would not. He assumed I was objecting as a matter of fashion and assured me that a poppy would offset the colour of my jacket.When I explained that I objected not to the style of the poppy (still less to the colour, which was fine) but to what it represented he was most insulted and stormed out of the room. SlaughterI went into the ‘waiting area’, where I made small talk to Cecil Parkinson and Jack Cunningham, who were both wearing poppies. After a few minutes the producer appeared with the news that there was ‘no time’ for my interview but it was time for me to leave.How I feel about poppies, cenotaphs, remembrance days and armistice celebrations is wonderfully expressed in a film now in the cinemas – Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But.The film is about the hunt for years after the First World War to fit the thousands of ‘missing persons’ to real corpses. The whole atmosphere stinks with the obsession and glorification of death in what, with the possible exception of the Holocaust, was the most futile and disgusting slaughter of human beings in all human history.At one stage two men appear to petition the commander. They point out that about 10 percent of the men called up in the war were killed in it. Their complaint is that in their village no one died.Seventeen young men were called up, and 17 came back without even a lost limb to show for their heroism. In all the surrounding villages people were building war memorials, holding masses, probably even wearing poppies (I am not sure when that awful symbol was first thought of), but in their village they had only the living.The two delegates begged the commander to alter the local government boundaries to ‘take in’ a farm from a neighbouring village. Two men from the farm had been killed in the war. The next village had plenty of dead to celebrate and would not miss a mangy two! If the village could claim two dead, the morale of all the villagers would soar. Everyone could join in the mass worship of the dead.It starts as a joke, but the earnestness of the two men soon cuts out any laughter. This was a deadly serious business, into which was thrown the entire effort of the French ruling class.Their most crucial priority at that time was to glorify those who had died, not for their lives but for their deaths, to make of death on the battlefield a human achievement of which all the loved ones of the dead could feel proud.In all the sorrow, and the celebration of sorrow, no one would ask questions – why did all this have to happen, and who is responsible? AtrocityThe wretched clusters of people searching for their dead husbands, brothers and sons are acting partly out of grief and nostalgia, but increasingly to build up their own self respect in a deeply chauvinist age.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. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBribery and corruption(13 February 1993)From Socialist Worker, No.1329, 13 February 1993, p.11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.JOHN POULSON died last week. He got enormous obituaries in all the posh papers.These obituaries were written in the sort of reverential tone which might have been reserved, say, for the prodigal son. The general theme was that here was a man who had strayed and should be pitied by all decent upper class people.The real reason for the sympathy was, however, not that Poulson was a crook but that he was caught. Tories are always singing the praises of self made men and John Poulson was certainly that. His background was the very essence of stout hearted English self help.Born into a relatively modest home in Yorkshire, he turned out to be a specially stupid young man. He tried his hand at architecture but could not pass even the most simple exam. Because he managed to set up a practice before the war, he was able to masquerade as a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, though in fact he would never in ten lifetimes have qualified.Poulson was a rotten architect but he was very good at “handling people”. As an employer he was a bully and a skinflint. Greedy ToryBut his most consummate skill was assessing the price of everyone he came in contact with.He was a Tory, but he noticed that Tories often charged more (and expected higher bribes) than Labour politicians, so he built his practice on the bribery of Labour councils in the north of England and Scotland.Of course if a greedy Tory came his way Poulson snapped him up. He welcomed wirth open wallet a Tory cabinet minister, Reginald Maudling, and a prominent Tory backbencher, John Cordle, whose membership of the Synod of the Church of England in no way precluded him from accepting generous bribes from John Poulson.Poulson built one of the biggest architectural practices in Europe by the simple device of bribing politicians, council officials, sheikhs and sultans.No Labour chairman of committees was too lowly for Poulson. Vast inedible dinners in hotels were his speciality for Labour councillors.There was no reason at all why John Poulson should ever have been knocked off his pedestal. The business world then (and now) was full of gangsters and charlatans who lived out their life in the full glow of their contemporaries’ high regard.Poulson was done down by his own greed. Like Robert Maxwell in a later period, he became obsessed with obtaining riches which were beyond his grasp. He borrowed too much and spent too much.When he finally went bankrupt, journalists who had honoured him and fed at his table turned on him to gloat at the “greatest corruption story of the decade”.Poulson went to prison for seven years. Yet he did nothing more than what other more skilful “entrepreneurs” have done.In many ways he was a model for the “enlightened self interest capitalism” which became known as Thatcherism. He helped himself at others’ expense, grabbed what he could from his workers, sold his cusptomers short with shoddy goods, built himself a palatial house and promised to do his duty to God and the Queen.When he wrote his life story he called it, appropriately, The Price. It didn’t sell any copies. Before it could even hit the bookstores it was being sued mercilessly by all sorts of people Poulson paid, and who would have done exactly the same if they had had the chance. Top of the pageLast updated on 7.2.2005"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootImmigration and the British Labour Movement(Autumn 1965)From International Socialism (1st Series), No.22, Autumn 1965, pp.8-13.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.1. Imperialism and Racial IdeologiesEver since the start of industrial history the ruling classes have sought propaganda methods to divert the attention of the workers from the ineptitude and savagery of capitalism. Imperialism and Race have been used with recurrent fervour for this purpose – and with great success. Both issues are closely interlocked. Hand in hand with propaganda about the glories of empire – so assiduously used to drug the militancy of the worker in the last century – went the notion that those conquered by British marauders were in some way intrinsically inferior to them. For the British such notions were tinged with colour. For the colonised peoples were almost all black or brown, while the British colonists, including those in Australia and America, were white. Thus all white men were great men, and all black men were ignorant illiterate savages. This was no accidental conclusion. It was the deliberate propaganda of 19th century imperialists.It was, no doubt, their countrymen’s success in the business of robbing and plundering overseas which provoked the native Briton to an instinctive dislike of those who came from overseas to join him at work. The French Protestants or Huguenots who fled from Catholic terror at the start of the British industrial revolution were treated – despite their undoubted talents both as artisans and Protestants – suspiciously and even with open violence. Similarly the hundreds of thousands of Irish who came across the Irish sea – driven by imperialism and its famines – were met with undisguised hostility. The working people of Glasgow, for instance, organised an annual treat, which they called Hunting the Barney. After a jovial march through the slum closes of the city, the gentle folk would seek out an Irishman and murder him for sport. [1] Similar outbreaks of crude violence and anti-foreigner propaganda far more savage than anything we know today were commonplace, particularly in the West of Scotland and on Merseyside. Delicate priests would issue from their studies the religious ‘justification’ for such racial intolerance, which was not confined to the ‘lumpen’ mob. Often the most militant, most politically conscious of the embryonic working-class organisations showed most bitterness against the foreigner. To some extent, this was caused by the employers, who, at the time of strike, made common practice of journeying to Ireland and recruiting Irishmen for their factories, mines and mills at half pay. The starving Irishmen were quite prepared to brave the militancy of the English or Scottish trade unionists for a loaf of bread. Often, they paid for their daring with their lives.Such antipathy infiltrated the minds of even the greatest socialist theorists. Frederick Engels wrote of the Irish immigrant in Manchester that ‘his crudity places him little above the savage’ and made it plain that no revolution could depend on this half-savage for support. [2] Some years later Ben Tillett summed up the dilemma of the international socialist in a speech on Tower Hill. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are our brothers and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come to this country.’ Despite the resentment of the working class and the chauvinist bourgeoisie against the immigrant, the politicians were not worried. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century there were no powers for the Government to control immigration, no powers to deport immigrant criminals nor any demand for such powers. During this period the entire world could, in theory, have come into Britain free of restriction. The reasons for this liberalism were part economic, part political. Economically, Britain was by far the leading capitalist nation, and as such believed firmly in Free Trade. The winners of any race are, by nature, opposed to handicaps. With Free Trade and the free movement of goods went the free movement of that valuable commodity – labour.Similarly, politically, British politicians, not unfairly, regarded themselves as revolutionaries – champions of the new, dynamic capitalism; bitter enemies of the decaying feudalism which still hampered so many countries in Europe. Liberals held out their hands, grandiloquently, to political refugees from feudalism, and gloried in the ‘right of asylum’. Mazzini and Garibaldi, bourgeois revolutionaries par excellence, were welcomed as refugees into Britain, and Gladstone stomped the country pouring out invective against the inhumanity of the Italians in their dealings with Neopolitan political offenders. Palmerston forced the Portuguese into an amnesty for political prisoners. Yet at the same time both statesmen nodded their heads wisely as the convicted patriots (bourgeois revolutionaries also) of the Young Ireland State trials at Clonmel (1848) were deported by the British Government to Tasmania. They welcomed revolutionaries against feudalism in other lands; but they deported revolutionaries against imperialism.Even worse for these gentlemen was the emergence of men and women who called themselves revolutionaries, but who seemed uninterested in the struggle between capitalism and feudalism. These people – ‘anarchists’ or ‘nihilists’ as they were usually called – were opposed not so much to feudalism in one country as to capitalism in all countries. Moreover they were gaining access to Britain by quoting the right of political asylum. A man called Marx, for instance, had lived in Britain for 34 years, as a political refugee, yet his propaganda, apparently, was directed against the British Government as well as the German Government!Other European countries had taken action against anarchists from 1860 onwards, and after the Extradition Act of 1870 Britain promised to keep a close watch on the ports for any incoming ‘anarchists’. At the same time the economic basis for free immigration was being gradually undermined. America, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan – all were gaining in competitive strength. The British slumps in the 1870s and 1880s were the deepest of the century, and pressure groups arose, particularly among Midlands Tories, for restrictions on goods to protect Britain against her competitors. With the demands for protection went demands for the control and sifting of immigration labour."
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"content": "Such demands coincided with the persecution of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the consequent exodus of destitute political refugees, heading mainly for America. In the twenty-five years from 1880 to 1905 some 100,000 Jews settled in England, mainly in the East End of London. It was against the Jews that the reactionary Tory rump directed most of its propaganda, resulting in a Royal Commission in 1903.The Royal Commission effectively destroyed all the allegations against the Jews which were current on the extreme Right. The Jews, said the Commission, were not markedly more criminal or diseased than the indigenous population; their houses were overcrowded – but no more so than many houses of English people in other areas. The shocking conditions in which they lived were common throughout the English working class. Nevertheless the Commission (with two out of seven members dissenting) advocated immigration control.Balfour’s Tory Government, relieved by an excuse to introduce worthless and pointless legislation after long years of misrule, hastily drew up an Aliens Act. But so powerful was the Opposition from the Liberals that they were forced to withdraw it and bring forward another Act in 1905. This was opposed again, but was finally passed under the guillotine. The Act gave Home Office officials the right to refuse entry to ‘destitute’ aliens on grounds of poverty or disease.The Labour Party, small as it was, had split over the Aliens Act in 1904, three of its Parliamentary Members opposing the Act, and three abstaining. But in 1905 all six voted against the Act. In a powerful speech Keir Hardie described the Bill as ‘fraudulent, deceitful and dishonourable’. He demanded its replacement by an Unemployed Workmen’s Bill and asserted that ‘there is no demand for this Bill from the working classes’. [3] The Aliens Act became law in August, and in December the Liberals swept into office. They were forced then to manipulate the Act which they had so bitterly opposed, without, apparently, any opposition from the Labour Party, which had grown considerably in Parliamentary strength. Yet it was not until 1911, when Mr Winston Churchill went down to Sydney Street, there to watch heroically while several foreign anarchists were burnt to death, that the Liberals finally gave in to the Tory extremist pressure and promised stricter immigrant legislation. The Liberal Government of the time lasted five years before stiffening restrictions they had opposed; while the Labour Government of 1964-65, in not dissimilar circumstances, has waited nine months.Indeed the Liberal Government refrained from further legislation until 1914, when they hurried through an emergency Aliens Act, intended only for wartime. Such was the monstrous chauvinism of the First World War, however, that the 1914 Act was re-enacted permanently in 1919. The Act gave powers to the Home Secretary arbitrarily to deport all foreigners in Britain, and to his officials to refuse anyone entry on their own initiative. Foreigners in Britain, under the Act, must register with the police and inform them of any movement from district to district. The Act is still in effect today. It is this Act under which Soblen was deported and Delgado was refused leave to land. It is the most savage Act dealing with foreigners in the industrial world, outside Russia, China and Eastern Europe. 2. Labour Party ReactionsThe Labour Party at the time unanimously opposed the Act. Josiah Wedgwood, for instance, the Labour Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, spoke in terms which were at the time widely accepted throughout the Labour Movement:‘We believe that the interests of the working classes everywhere are the same, and these gentlemen (the Tories) will find it difficult to spread a spirit of racial hatred amongst those people who realise that the brotherhood of man and the international spirit of the workers is not merely a phrase but a reality.’ [4]Yet the ‘international spirit of the workers’ was to vanish fast from the Labour benches. In the election at the end of 1924 in which the first Labour Government was flung from office, there were two main issues. The first was the ‘Red Letter’ alleged to have come from Zinoviev. The second was alien immigration. From constituency to constituency the Tory candidates raised the issue of immigration, indicating that Labour policy was to ‘Let Them All Come’. To which the Labour leaders argued strenuously that this was not the case. If anything, they boasted, Labour had naturalised fewer foreigners than the Conservatives!Thus, when the Tories hammered the point home soon after the election by moving an adjournment motion for tighter immigration control, Labour collapsed officially. They put up a London ILP-er called John Scurr to move an amendment, not opposing control, as in 1919, but opposing harsher measures. Scurr himself was an internationalist, and, goaded by the Tories during his speech, he slipped into internationalist terminology:‘We are all internationalists,’ he shouted.Hon. Members: ‘All of you?’G. Lansbury: ‘Yes, and why not?’Scurr: ‘We are not afraid to say that we are internationalists – all of us. (Laughter). The boundaries between nations are artificial.’No one can relate what that laughter represented. Perhaps it was provoked by the expressions on the faces of Labour leaders as they watched Scurr throwing away hundreds of votes by standing up to the racists.As Tory pressure continued, so the Labour Party retreated further. By the time the Labour Government took office in 1929, they had rejected all traces of internationalism in their attitude to aliens. Indeed it was a Labour Home Secretary, John Clynes, who laid the ghost of the ‘right of political asylum’ with his contemptuous refusal to allow Leon Trotsky to enter Britain, on the grounds that ‘persons of mischievous intention would unquestionably seek to exploit his presence for their own ends’.Thus the attitude of the Labour Party – and the trade unions – throughout the twenties and thirties remained thoroughly restrictionist. The old concepts of internationalism which had inspired so many of its members at the outset were very quickly forgotten – and were never again revived. Even the so-called ‘Left’ of the Party, symbolised by the formation of the Socialist League in 1935, stuck firmly to the chauvinist example set by Clynes and Macdonald."
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"content": "These traditions clung grimly to the Labour movement immediately after the election of a Labour Government in 1945. Indeed nothing demonstrated more clearly that the Labour leaders of that time were nonplussed by capitalist development than their attitude to aliens. Cripps, Dalton and company were as convinced as any revolutionary socialist that a slump was inevitable, and that they could do nothing to prevent it. Thus when a few back-benchers, including James Callaghan, called for a Government policy of recruiting labour abroad, Cripps and Dalton turned them down on the grounds that the foreign workers would present a serious problem when (not if) the slump came.Yet as it became clear that full employment – through no action of theirs – was here to stay, the Government was forced to look abroad for more workers. They were hampered by the ludicrous bureaucracy of the Aliens Act, which made any voluntary mass influx of foreigners impossible. Rather than repeal the Act, however (and give the impression of solidarity with the foreign workers), the Government moved outside it and established special schemes known as the European Volunteer Worker schemes. Under these schemes, the Government recruited about 250,000 displaced workers from Europe, including about 100,000 Poles, many of whom were in this country after the war and were reluctant to return to Stalinism in their homeland. A vicious campaign against the Poles, whose terms would bring a flush of pleasure to the cheeks of any modern racialist, was waged by the Communist Party and their two Parliamentary spokesmen, William Gallacher and Phil Piratin. Gallacher and Piratin never missed an opportunity to point out that the Poles were dirty, lazy and corrupt and should go back to their own country. [5]The terms under which these European Volunteer Workers came to Britain were extremely harsh. There was no question of the families, as of right, joining their menfolk, and the wives were allowed in only if they could prove that they too would get a job. If the workers fell ill, they were deported. When a Ukrainian boy who had fallen off a lorry and lost his sight while working as an agricultural labourer was deported to Germany, Mr Ernest Bevin brushed the matter aside with the homily, ‘These people have only been brought here to save them from forcible deportation to the Soviet Union and they have no claim as prisoners of war to remain here.’ Thus spoke the humanitarian Methodism to which the Labour Party owes so much of its heritage.This grisly process of contract labour could not last for ever. The expanding economies of Germany, France, Switzerland and Belgium quickly mopped up not only the remaining supply of displaced workers in Europe, but also the millions of workers who fled, helter-skelter, from the new Workers’ Paradises in the East. For a short time it looked as though the British economy would be throttled by a shortage of labour. What saved it was a historical accident of imperialism. 3. ‘Commonwealth’ Immigrants and Labour’s CollapseFor the old robbers and imperialists who had crossed the high seas in search of new forms of exploitation in the nineteenth century, had, as a demonstration of their good manners and better feelings, imposed on their subjects the privilege of British citizenship. The only recognisable right of a British citizen in a colonial country was to come to Britain free of the harsh restrictions of the Aliens Act. Thus from 1948 onwards, workers in the West Indies, and, later, peasants from India and Pakistan began to make use of their sole privilege and seek work in Britain. Unlike aliens, and unlike European Volunteer Workers, these new workers could at will bring with them, or summon after them their wives, children and parents.The Labour Government, under whose auspices the process of Commonwealth immigration started, was happy to sit back and do nothing about it. But large-scale immigration did not begin until 1954. Between 1954 and 1961, when the Conservative Government first introduced a Bill to control Commonwealth immigration, some 200,000 coloured migrants entered the country. They were by no means all unskilled labourers. Many were skilled, white-collar employees – trained doctors, nurses, teachers and the like. Yet the majority of the migrant workers found their way (totally unaided) to the buses of London, the hospitals and engineering shops in the Midlands, and the mills of the West Riding and Lancashire.The initial reaction of the Labour movement was to do and say nothing. There is no official Labour statement on the matter until 1958, and the trade union conference confined themselves to general anti-racialist resolutions without reference to the specific social problems of immigration. Indeed the earliest demands for immigration control – in 1954 – came from Mr John Hynd, the Labour MP for Sheffield, Attercliffe [6], and Mr Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour MP for Smethwick. [7] The Labour Party in Parliament confined itself to sporadic questions about ‘integration’ from the back benches. In 1958, however, inspired by the Notting Hill riots and a back-bench Private Member’s Motion the Labour Party took a firm stand on the control question. Just as in 1905, and in 1919, their attitude was total opposition to control, but immediately their reasons for such an attitude differed sharply from the previous occasions. Thus Arthur Bottomley, Front Bench spokesman on Commonwealth questions, spoke out in the House on 5 December 1958:‘We on this side are clear in our attitude towards restricted immigration. I think I speak for my Right Honourable and Honourable friends by saying that we are categorically against it ... The central principle on which our status in the Commonwealth is largely dependent is the “open door” to all Commonwealth citizens. If we believe in the importance of our great Commonwealth we should do nothing in the slightest degree to undermine that principle.’"
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"content": "Gone was the argument of Keir Hardie that control was ‘deceitful’ in that it did not solve the problems of the working class; gone was the argument of Josiah Wedgwood that ‘we believe that the interests of the working classes everywhere are the same’. A new element had crept into the discussion. It was ‘our great Commonwealth’.Bottomley’s ‘categorical’ opposition to control of Commonwealth Immigration was repeated officially in 1960 and half-way through 1961 by Party leaders, although the matter was never discussed at Party Conference. When the Tories, bowing beneath the pressure from the constituencies and the small, well-organised right-wing group in Parliament, introduced a Bill to control Commonwealth Immigration, the Parliamentary Labour Party decided by a substantial majority to oppose it. Their opposition was prolonged and principled. In Parliament, they fought every line of the Bill, plugging it with huge gaps which they were later, in power, to close. Outside Parliament, they launched a campaign against the Bill, which fired the enthusiasm of all the principled sections of the movement, including, even, the Young Socialists.Yet it was the arguments used which, in the long run, proved catastrophic for Labour. True, Gaitskell, Brown and Gordon Walker all emphasised that control did not solve the real social problems which gave rise to resentment against the immigrants. But the fundamental argument which ran through every speech and every article in opposition to the Bill from official Labour and from all sections of the Parliamentary Party heralded Bottomley’s rallying cry about ‘our great Commonwealth’.Thus Gaitskell:‘It is rather moving. I found when I was there that they look on us as the Mother Country in a very real sense ... I simply say that we are the Mother Country and we ought not to forget it.’ [8]Thus Arthur, later Lord, Royle:‘The second reason why they come here is that they are loyal members of the Commonwealth and turn as of right to the Mother Country to obtain the things which the Mother Country alone can give them.’ [9]Thus Barbara Castle:‘I do not care whether or not fighting this Commonwealth Immigration Bill will lose me my seat, for I am sure that this Bill will lose this country the Commonwealth.’ [10]One of the main wrecking amendments to the Bill was moved jointly by Mr John Biggs Davison and Mr Robin Turton of the Tory extreme Right and Mr Michael Foot and Mr Sydney Silverman.The old internationalism with which Labour had fought the Aliens Acts had vanished without trace. In its place was this crude and reactionary maternalism. For loyalty to the Commonwealth, whatever the progressive terms in which it is phrased, is nothing more nor less than inverted imperialism. Those who ask for special privileges for Commonwealth citizens are accepting that people who have been conquered by Britain should be treated more leniently than people conquered by a foreign power.Since so much of the Labour Opposition depended on this maternalism, it was not long before the entire case, which, at the time of the Second Reading of the Bill (November 1961), was reinforced with strong and principled arguments, degenerated utterly. By February 1962, Labour back-benchers were moving amendments to the Bill that people who had fought in the war should be allowed to come into Britain free. By November 1963, when Labour was forced to oppose the continuance of the Act, Wilson (much more reactionary and opportunist on this issue than Gaitskell) could complain about the ‘loopholes’ in the Act which his own Party had created. Wilson’s only grounds for opposing the continuance of the Act on that occasion was that the Tories had not ‘consulted’ the Commonwealth Governments. Keeping out the blacks seemed to Labour in 1963 a perfectly reasonable proposition, provided the blacks were told about it in advance.Although the Labour ‘line’ now appeared consistent, the whole of the argument was now about the Commonwealth. No longer did Labour members insist that control would not solve the real social problems, or that it was a sop to racialists. Thus what little meat there was in the Labour case in 1961-2 had disappeared completely a year later. It needed only a final shove to push Labour off their nominal opposition to the Immigration Act.The man who gave the shove was a young schoolteacher who lived in Smethwick, whose name was Peter Griffiths. Griffiths, cast precisely in the Joseph Chamberlain Midlands Tory tradition (which has for fifty years attracted considerable working-class support), could not regard himself as likely ever to be persona grata in the Tory hierarchy. He has a strong Midland accent, and he is a crude reactionary. Unless he could win Smethwick for the Conservatives, his chances elsewhere would be minimal. He watched with interest then as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association moved into Smethwick in 1961, and, helped by able local propagandists, succeeded in exciting hundreds of working-class people in Smethwick against the immigrant. Griffiths adopted their techniques and their propagandists over a powerful two-year anti-immigrant campaign and took the seat off Labour in a swing of 7.2 per cent – against a national swing the other way of 3.5 per cent. The highest ‘swing’ to the Tories anywhere else in Britain was 3.5 per cent (in neighbouring West Bromwich)."
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"content": "Griffiths proved that a concerted anti-immigrant., racialist campaign, if given time, can explode the solidarity with Labour of the working-class electorate. Labour took the hint. No sooner had they settled in office but they started to tighten the controls. Gunter announced on the 17 November 1964 that there would be no more ‘C’ vouchers (for unskilled immigrants) issued, unless the prospective immigrant could show that he had fought in the war. On 5 April Soskice was promising stricter controls within the existing legislation and in mid-July, the Government finally announced a ‘quota’ system by which no more than 8,000 voucher holders would be allowed in each year from the Commonwealth. The Labour Government’s attempt to gloss over this collapse with ‘integrative measures’ and a Race Relations Act have failed miserably. Throughout, they have been compromised. The Race Relations Bill, for instance, does not deal either with housing or with employment – the two main areas of discrimination – and is in the main a restatement of the Public Order Acts, 1936. 4. ConclusionsThree crucial lessons for the Labour movement and the class it represents arise from this brief history. First, there is the unusual power and strength of racialist propaganda. Reactionary propaganda, in normal circumstances, has a political effect only within the limits of economic circumstances. Yet racial propaganda can move for long periods beyond the bounds of economic circumstances, and, further, can give otherwise impotent politicians enormous power and influence. The example of the Southern States of America hangs threateningly over the British working class. For in the period immediately after the Civil War, the Populist movement began to forge the links between white and black workers which, if completed, could only have had revolutionary consequences. Negro delegates were elected to all the State legislatures, and the leading working-class organisations joined with the Negroes to outvote, and eventually, they hoped, to overthrow the traditional ruling class in the South. Tom Watson, the Populist leader, called again and again to ‘our friends’ the Negroes, with whom the ‘poor whites’ must unite to overthrow the despotism of the planter. Observers in the South at the time noted with amazement that the incidence of racial discrimination in the South was less even than in New England, the traditional home of Northern abolitionism. The revolutionary consequences of the links between the poor white and the Negro were not lost on the two political parties, the planters or indeed the Northern Liberals. Thus it was that towards the end of the last century the great campaign was started by politicians from both Republican and Democratic parties (particularly the latter), by the planters, and – if only by their acquiescence – the Northern Liberals, to split the new alliance. With the poll tax, the white primary and a constant stream of anti-black propaganda they turned the poor white against the Negro, until poor old Tom Watson was shouting racist drivel with the rest of them. Having once staved off the revolutionary potential of a multi-racial working class alliance, however, the propaganda and the race-hatred could not stop itself, and reached proportions which were unacceptable, not only to the Northern Liberals, but also to the Southern ruling class itself. It is worth remembering that the membership of the Klu Klux Klan is almost entirely working-class.Thus, also, in South Africa the intelligent capitalists are crying for an end to the colour bar and to a system of exploitation which allows for a relevant division of labour. They are held back by white workers who will strike rather than accept black men alongside them in the factory. The racial prejudice which the ruling class has unleashed to split the workers knows no master. It distorts the capitalist pattern out of all recognition. It is quite useless for socialists to sit back and say, ‘The capitalist system, in the long run, will unite the different racists in the process of production.’ Racist propaganda can, at will, divide the class even while the process of production unites it. Thus it must be met with fierce propaganda from the other side. Further, racialist propagandists are never satisfied. They thrive on acquiescence. In the years 1920-1926 – a period of intense racist propaganda – more aliens left the country than came in. The Control Acts of 1916 and 1961 were followed, not by acquiescence, but by renewed racist propaganda by the extremist politicians.Secondly, there is the need for ‘integration’. The word is much abused, used far too often in a ‘teach them to live like us’ meaning. No progressive, much less socialist, is going to be associated with moves to rob people of their culture and customs. Nor, on the other hand, will he spurn the opportunity to counter the ludicrous propaganda about the immigrant community which is common gossip in many ‘affected’ working-class communities. For instance, there are very few statistics to show higher rates of crime or of disease among coloured immigrants in Britain. In the first two and a half years of immigration four Indians and six Pakistanis have been deported for criminal offences (compared, for instance, with 378 Irish), and the rate of venereal disease among Asians and the rate of tuberculosis among West Indians are in both cases lower than the rates in the indigenous population. Crime and disease among immigrants, where they are exceptionally widespread are directly due to the foul, insanitary conditions in which they are forced to live."
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"content": "The foulest lie of all is the connection which is drawn between the immigrant population and the housing shortage. It is necessary constantly here to emphasise contribution. Housing shortages and the like are quite unrelated to the numbers of people in the planning area, since all these people, or almost all, are contributing to the general levy of production (or have contributed or will contribute). Take away the immigrant community and you take away their contribution to the social services, which, if anything, is slightly higher per head than that of the indigenous population. A higher proportion of immigrants are at work than the indigenous population, and many of them have entered the country as fit and available workers, whom the capitalist State is not forced to ‘educate’ or pay out family allowances for. Constantly, remorselessly the point must be driven home: modern capitalism, for all its apparent slumplessness, has not started to provide even the most basic social services for the people who produce its wealth. The number of people in any given area is quite irrelevant to the state of those services, whose shortage is entirely due to an economic system which produces wealth for the benefit and superiority of a class. Finally, there is the problem of immigration control. The matter is crucial, because it is in terms of control that the issue is always discussed, and it is under the ‘realistic’ demands for control that the racists launch their most powerful propaganda. Against the argument for control, which is accepted by some 80 per cent, if not more, of the British working class there is one defensive argument, and one offensive.The defensive argument stems from the one iron law about international migration since capitalism began – that migration corresponds almost exactly to the economic situation in the receiving country. Thus the ‘right’ of Commonwealth immigration, although in existence for some 200 years, was not used until 1948 because there was no security of employment in Britain. Similarly, during the fifties the ‘net’ immigration into Britain from the coloured Commonwealth levelled out at some 40,000 per year during 1955, 1956, and 1957. Yet in 1958 and 1959, for no legal or administrative reason, it dropped to 20,000 a year. This was the direct result of Mr. Thorneycroft’s recession at the end of 1957 which resulted in the then highest unemployment since the war. Since the Commonwealth Immigration Act, Irish immigration, which remains uncontrolled, has corresponded almost exactly to the rise and fall of vacancies in Britain, as indeed has Puerto Rican immigration into America which is also, for similar reasons, uncontrolled.Even if we accept all the capitalist premises, then, immigration control has nothing to do with ‘flooding the labour market’ or any such nonsense. Automatically, immigration corresponds to the needs of the economy. Similarly, in close capitalist logic, immigration does not in any way aggravate the shortage of social services, since the immigrant brings with him not only his body, which has to be housed, but also his work, which helps to build the house. Immigration control is not a creature of logic, even of capitalist logic. It has nothing to do with reason, even capitalist reason. It is a direct product of and capitulation to reason’s opposite, prejudice.Yet this argument pales into insignificance before the real, offensive socialist argument which concerns the man who is being controlled. Upon what basis is the Indian or the Pakistani or the Jamaican refused leave to better himself by migration? The methods of immigration control reveal its true nature. People are kept out because they are sick; because they have in the past committed crimes; because, above all, they are unskilled. Yet these are the people who most need to migrate, who most need the better services and training facilities which migration brings. Why then keep them out? Simply (get out those manifestos again) because that is the method which ‘most benefits Britain’.Immigration control is chauvinist legislation. It cannot be contemplated by an international socialist, for its whole rationale is founded on the nation state and the feverish competition in which that nation state is engaged. This struggle between nation states has two main effects. It splits and divides workers from their main objectives, and, in the long run, weakens their strength all over the world. Second, it continues the ruthless division between former imperialists and former colonial subjects. While the battle between nation states continues there remains no chance for a switch in resources from the ‘developed’ to the ‘underdeveloped’ world.The chauvinist tradition in the British Left is today its greatest enemy. It is this tradition which drives ‘extreme’ Left-wingers in Parliament and outside to talk of immigration control as ‘planning’ and something which should therefore be welcomed. ‘Planning’ to these people is national planning: Neddy, the Coal Board, British Rail and the nationalisation of steel. The restricted immigrants get no benefit from the overall ‘plan’. But they can be forgotten. They are not British. As Mr. Patrick Gordon Walker wrote to his former constituents:‘This is a British country with British standards of behaviour. The British should come first.’The inhumanity and chauvinism of the Methodist Left can best be summed up in their overnight conversion to immigration control on the basis that this is ‘planning’ for a better Britain. Of course, they all want international planning one day. In the meantime they are happy with the national plan. In their heart of hearts, they are hoping for the sun. In the meantime they will continue to pray for, and urge on the rain."
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"content": "The only possible attitude of an international socialist is outright opposition to immigration control. Yet it is only by taking the argument two stages further that such a position will ever convince the working class. First, that the socialist case does not stop with opposition to control: that the process whereby the employers of one country go out (as for instance the German employers go to Turkey) to recruit thousands of workers en masse, uproot them from their homes, house them in ghettos, use them as cheap labour to soften the militancy of indigenous workers – this process has nothing whatever to do with international socialism. Socialists must make it clear that they are looking for a system where people are not forced through economic circumstances to leave the homes and cultures they know and understand: that under international socialism, movement between countries is free, of course, but it is in the real sense voluntary.Finally, opposition to immigration control must not become the sole province of well-meaning liberals who ‘believe’ in the fundamental equality of God’s children. Socialists must make it clear that they are opposed to anti-immigrant propaganda, opposed to immigration control, not for any abstract principle, but because of the need of workers of all nationalities, to forge a weapon which, unlike immigration control, will carve out the highest standards of life and living for all workers. Top of the page Footnote1. See James Handley, The Irish in Scotland.2. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 1844.3. House of Comment, 2 May 1905.4. Ibid., 22 October 1919.5. See the debate on the Second Reading of the Polish Resettlement Bill, Ibid., 12 February 1947.6. Ibid., 5 November 1954.7. See Smethwick Telephone and News Chronicle, 12 November 1954.8. House of Commons, 16 November 1961.9. Ibid.10. Ibid., 14 January 1962. Top of the pageLast updated on 11.5.2008"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootToussaint L’Ouverture:The Haitian Slave Revolt of 1791(July 1991)A lecture by Paul Foot delivered on 12 July 1991 in London.Transcribed by Adrian Leibowitz.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Well, we are playing once again the anniversary game here, 1791 to 1991. There was a very good example of that the other day, I don’t know whether you saw in the newspapers, that her Royal Highness, the Princess Royal was making a speech for the Observer newspaper to celebrate two-hundred years since the publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. It was the Tom Paine lecture, sponsored by the Observer and one of the quotes in The Rights of Man, which was not used on that occasion, which I picked out here, in which Thomas Paine said “Monarchy is a silly stupid thing. A play thing for the rich and a menace for the poor”. Now that’s the theme actually of The Rights of Man, Common Sense, Crisis Papers, most of Thomas Paine’s life was devoted to the destruction of monarchy. And it is part of what might be called the revolutionary necrophilia which runs through the ages, that is, that each age worships the revolutionaries of the past and loves revolutionaries provided only that they are dead. And the longer that they are dead the better for them. That is the usual state of affairs with people in our tradition, that are heralded by the existing society.Now, what we are dealing with today is another notch up, if you like, in that process. You have revolutionary necrophilia, you also have a phenomenon called revolutionary amnesia – that is in which people forget altogether what has happened in the past. The Observer does not have a Toussaint L’Ouverture lecture. The Observer is celebrating its two-hundredth anniversary and when I rang up rather plaintively suggested that they might have an article on Toussaint L’Ouverture, on August the 14th, well August the 18th which is a Sunday, to celebrate the uprising in Saint Domingue in 1791, which after all was rather appropriate since the Observer was started pretty well about that time I was told that ‘we were looking too much into the past’ and ‘such a thing was absolutely out of the question’. I don’t know whether you have been reading the Observer, but every single thing in the colour supplement over the last six months has been heralding what happened in 1791. In other words they will remember everything, except perhaps the most important event of that year, more important even than the publication of The Rights of Man, I would argue. Perhaps more important than anything else in the whole history of the world, it’s no great exaggeration to say that, the events that started in 1791 in San Domingo in the West Indies.And to get us there I’ll ask a few ‘O’ Level questions, I know you’re, this is the cream of the Marxist intelligentsia in this country and therefore you’ve all not only got ‘O’ Levels but also ‘A’ Levels and therefore the (questions will easily) answers will trip off your tongue as I (make) as I suggest the questions. I ask the question ‘Who abolished slavery?’ and in a great roar the answer will come back ‘William Wilberforce abolished slavery’. One of the most heroic and greatest feats in the history of Great Britain is that this grand old Christian gentleman and Tory MP, from Hull, somehow, struggling himself from factory to factory ... which he owned ... and, er ... treating the workers there ... well like ... like slaves – somehow himself by prodigious effort and enormous amount of prayer managed to abolish one of the great obscenities in the whole history in the human race. And he was assisted in that regard, and this also will be in your ‘O’ Level syllabus, by the youngest ever, Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt. The Tory Prime Minister of the day, together with Wilberforce drew up the first abolition bill for getting rid of slavery themselves. That is the Tory MP plus his friend and mentor, William Wilberforce drew up a bill to abolish slavery in 1792. It never did get on the statute book – but the answer is quite simple isn’t it – William Wilberforce abolished slavery and he was helped by William Pitt. And therefore, not only the great inventions and deeds of civilization have been of course created by grand bourgeois people but also the great reforms of history have been carried out by grand bourgeois people, the changes, the end of exploitation have been bought around by people like Wilberforce and Pitt."
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"content": "And now we come, to get us to the destination where we want to start – we come to another set of questions with which the answer will be very, very familiar to you: ‘who discovered America?’ That’s absolutely ... everybody knows that, don’t they. ‘Christopher Columbus discovered America’. I mean it was annoying that there were about six hundred thousand people living there at the time who had apparently discovered it before him, but there’s no doubt that Christopher Columbus discovered America. That is he discovered it for the Spanish empire for whom he represented. He was an explorer and he represented the Spanish empire. He also discovered, in fact, the same year as he discovered America, or the year afterwards, I think, he discovered a paradise island, what he described as a paradise island. The closest thing to paradise on the face of the earth – he described it like that. And because it was so wonderful he called it, naturally, Hispaniola – that is, something that’s come out of Spain. Because it was so beautiful it was plainly something to do with the Spanish empire. This was the largest island in what later became known as the West Indies. The island itself of Hispaniola was about the size of Ireland; a fairly substantial size and when Columbus discovered it again there were about a million people living there in apparent reasonable peace and reasonable friendship with one another – they didn’t fight each other very often or anything like that. They weren’t trained in the advanced practices of white Christian civilization and therefore on the whole they didn’t fight each other. And the Spanish empire were so delighted with having got hold of this island which they thought might contain gold – as a matter of fact it hardly did contain any gold, but they thought it might – that they started in the most extraordinarily short period of time to exterminate the entire population. And I mean exterminate. There were a million people there in 1493 when the island was discovered, by 1520, certainly by 1550, there were no more than 50,000 of the million people there, simply because they had been put to work in the most brutal fashion known to the Spanish empire, which was perhaps the most brutal of all – although it’s a close run thing and we are not going to get worked ... have an argument now as to which was the most brutal of the empires. At any rate, the entire indigenous population of the country was destroyed. And the Spanish imperialists, some of whom had turned into colonists, were therefore faced with the awkward question of how they were to get the wealth out of a territory if there was no-one to get it out for them.Now the time our story starts, Hispaniola is no longer called Hispaniola. It’s an island which is divided into two through the imperialist wars that have taken place in that part of the world – chiefly between the empire of Spain and the empire of France. The empire of Spain owned the eastern half of the island, which was called Santo Domingo. The empire of France owned the western half of the island, which was called Saint Domingue. Now, it was something to do with the relative life that was left in the two imperialisms, if you like, that the Spanish part had been left to rot. There were a hundred and twenty five thousand people there, cattle simply roaming about, pretty well nothing cultivated. But the French half, Saint Domingue ... remember now that this island, just in case you’re still floundering about wondering where the hell we are, this island is now called Haiti. And this island, Haiti, is now among the five or ten poorest places on earth, both in terms of the state of the people there and in terms of its production. Now in terms of its production, the western half of San Domingo, Saint Domingue, in 1789 just to take a year, a convenient year at which we might start, in 1789, was the richest place on earth. It produced two thirds of all the proceeds of the trade of France. France being perhaps the richest, or the second richest country in the world, one of the biggest empires in the world, two thirds of all its trade was provided by production from Saint Domingue. Something to do with mixture of climate made it an extremely cultivable place. And sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, tobacco were produced in that part of the world more, easier and in greater numbers, in greater volume than in any other place on earth. Whole cities in France, Nantes for instance, Bordeaux, places that you would have visited on your holidays, were all dependent there, dependent almost entirely upon the trade which came from Saint Domingue.Now this vast wealth was entirely dependent on one phenomenon. That is the phenomenon of slavery. I’m not going to go into it in any length because on this subject really we’re not in great difference with the people who produce great series’ on television and so on, nothing distinguishes us very much. Everybody regards slavery as an obscenity. Everybody – horrible thing that happened! I just want to give one or two figures to demonstrate the size of it. Between 1500 and 1800, three hundred years, before this ... just up to where this story starts, thirty million slaves were taken from the continent of Africa to the West Indies and to the so-called New World in the United States of America."
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"content": "Now, thirty million, that sounds a lot anyway. If I tell you that the population of Britain at that time was a population of ten million – then what I am talking about is three times the population of Britain. That is equivalent to something like, to a hundred and fifty million people. An enormous percentage of the population of the whole continent of Africa were taken from relatively peaceful and friendly surroundings into a hell which it’s almost impossible to describe. I mean they were, you know about it, they were chained, put on the boats, they were the lucky ones, that the ones who died on the boats. They were treated as dogs, worse than dogs – worse more than animals and the slave trade was and certainly is accepted as being something unimaginably horrible in terms of the exploitation and horror. Nevertheless, the wealth in Saint Domingue at the time that we are talking about was entirely dependent upon this trade. There were in the island, this part of the island, thirty thousand whites, who were mainly either overseers, or part of the militia or the planters themselves; forty thousand mulattos – that is people of, what we would call today, probably wrongly ‘mixed race’, people who had come from a black mother usually and a white father and five-hundred thousand black slaves from Africa. That was the population, about six-hundred thousand people of Saint Domingue at these times. And two-thirds of the slaves in 1789, that were actually in Saint Domingue, had been born in Africa. There wasn’t you see a second generation, much of a second generation, or a third generation of slavery at that time; simply because there wasn’t time really to have children and the slave drivers were not particularly interested in slaves that had children – because it was a process which held up the business of labour which produced profit for them. Eleven percent of the population of Saint Domingue every year died. Eleven percent. Now you might say well what’s that figure mean? Well it means that more people died in Saint Domingue every year, as a result of the very high death rate among the slave population, than for instance died in Britain in the First World War. If you wanted to find a time when lots of people died in this country you would immediately think of the First World War. A horrible massacre of young men, that went on and on for four years. But a much smaller percentage of the population died then that died now.Food was not provided. It was in the rules that food should be provided for slaves but on the whole food wasn’t provided for slaves. They worked a seven day week and an eighteen hour day, once they got to Saint Domingue in the fields picking the cotton, picking the coffee and generally getting the production out of the fields, that they had in their spare time to cultivate their own little patches in order to make vegetables for them to eat.The crucial thing about them was that they were not entitled to any minds of their own. No thought – one of the most savage sentences was handed out to anybody who gave any education to any slave. Even religion was regarded as dangerous as far as the slaves were concerned. I mean they were allowed to be baptised, mass baptisms, the Catholic Church were allowed in for a quick baptism, mass baptism and then out again. That was the total amount of time they were allowed religion in case any nonsense about ‘eyes of needles’ and ‘people being made of one blood’ and all that kind of thing should get out in the business of people going to church. And the whole process, of course, was held together by sadism. There’s no other word to describe how it operated. It was held together by violence of the most savage kind. The slightest sign of disobedience, the slightest sign of independent thought, the slightest talking, the slightest disobeying of any rules of any kind was treated with the utmost savagery – which is detailed in some of the books that were written just before our story starts. Baron de Wimpffen, for instance, a great liberal gentleman from France who went out to Saint Domingue, was rather shocked to be sitting next to a delightful and beautiful hostess who at one stage in the meal, because she was dissatisfied with the taste of some of the food, ordered that the cook should be put in the oven with the next course. That was standard way in which the hostesses behaved at that time to show off to their friends from colonial France."
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"content": "Now of course there were revolts. It’s not surprising. There were outbreaks of individual violence. But these were put down with such ferocity that they were never again countenanced. And the whole operation survived, on this notion of what I’ll call for the purposes of this afternoon, the conquerable mind. That is that the minds of slaves, the minds of these black people from Africa were conquerable, that is they were to be conquered and conquerable all the way through. It wasn’t only that there was savagery operated, it was also that they would never revolt. They could never revolt; it was not part of their makeup to do so. Those who say that, there are those who say that slavery was going to end anyway at some stage or other, you know these people who call themselves Marxists who say, who become the great determiners of what happened two or three hundred years ago. They become ... they decide what was going to happen. ‘Oh, well of course slavery was coming to an end anyway’ – my ... not at all the case. Slavery in Saint Domingue would have gone on and on and on; there was nothing in particular to stop it – a great many people were benefiting enormously from it and therefore it was likely to continue. One or two things happened which began to stop it. And the first thing that happened was the French Revolution of 1789.Now when the revolution took place France was controlled by people who had a conscience. Do you know people with a conscience? That is people with some wealth, considerable wealth but also conscience. And there was a problem for them about slavery. Because many of the writings in the Enlightenment which led up to the French Revolution, of course were denouncing slavery in the most savage way. How dare ... this is hostile to everything that can possibly be regarded as human happiness, universal human happiness of mankind. All those great writers denounced it, the Abbé Raynal, Condorcet, Rousseau, all those writers denounced slavery in the most uncompromising fashion. But the problem is once they’d got office, these same people, people from the Enlightenment – enlightened people – who’d come in, they realised there was a conflict. Because most of their income, much of their wealth, came precisely from the trade with Saint Domingue, which in turn as I have described depended entirely upon slavery. Therefore there was this awful thing which you see all the time in bourgeois politicians, you can see sometimes the schizophrenic mind. Here’s a man called Charles Lameth, this is the exception, for instance, of one of the people who came into office immediately after the French Revolution:“I am one of the great proprietors of San Domingo, but I declare to you that were I to lose all I possess there I would make the sacrifice rather than disown the principles which justice and humanity have consecrated.”He said I’m prepared to renounce, actually history doesn’t reveal whether he did personally renounce, but other people were more sophisticated about the problem. ‘We’re against slavery, it’s vile, it’s outrageous, it’s inhuman, it’s barbarity between man and man, no question about it we’re against slavery – but what about our money? What about our wealth, our big houses?’ and so on. And therefore what are we going to do about it? And they made a compromise. You’ll have heard about compromises in politics – people always make it. ‘Politics is the art of the possible’ that’s Nye Bevan, you know, not somebody coming along from the right or anything. Politics is the art of ... we have to make a compromise ... we have to make a compromise ... have to make a compromise. We can’t declare the slaves free in Saint Domingue because that will cut off all our wealth. On the other hand we can’t do nothing about it because that will cut us off from all the ideas of the Enlightenment which led us into this situation, which to our great surprise we are now in charge of the country. ‘So what are we going to do? We are going to have a compromise.’ They had a compromise and the compromise was a decree which said that any mulatto – remember the figures, thirty thousand whites, twenty-five thousand mulattos, five hundred thousand black slaves – any mulatto in Saint Domingue whose mother and father were born in France should get French citizenship. That amounted to about naught point eight percent of the mulattos! Not of the population altogether, but naught point eight percent of the mulattos. And that was the great compromise introduced by the first phase if you like, the first bourgeois phase, or ultra-bourgeois phase, right wing phase of the French Revolution."
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"content": "Now, no one was satisfied with the compromise – it was rather like the poll tax. Everybody was against it. It annoyed the mulattos, it annoyed the slaves, naturally because they got absolutely nothing out of it. But most of all it annoyed the whites. Now, anyone should dare to suggest, even that 0.8% of mulattos should get French citizenship was an outrageous situation. But the point about the decree is that it loosened the logjam, what appeared to be a logjam that existed in Saint Domingue. In other words, the notion that ‘the conquerable mind’, the idea of half a million people forever and ever obeying their masters was suddenly challenged. Even in that tiny degree challenged – the fact that there was a debate going on in the French assembly, the fact that the French revolutionaries were discussing what they are going to do about slavery seeps into the minds of many of the people, the slaves that are operating in Saint Domingue. And there takes place then, August the 14th, I hope you put a ring round it and see what you are doing on August the 14th and do something to celebrate the date. But August the 14th 1791, under, immediately under a man called Boukman there is an uprising in one of the plantations in the north. And before the planters know what is happening pretty well the whole of the north of the island is in conflagration. And I mean conflagration.Because what happened, of course the brutality which had led to, all those years of brutality in slavery, led to the most brutal treatment, and you may say quite right too ... the most brutal treatment of the planters. They were hanged ... their great houses were burned and then of course as the planters got themselves together they went back and engaged in equal savagery wherever they could get hold of anywhere. In fact in some places – even in the places where they didn’t rise up, slaves were hung and killed just because others elsewhere had risen in an uprising. The uprising of August 14 was different to any other in ferocity to any other uprising that had taken place. But it was similar in this, that there was no leadership of it. It was entirely spontaneous – moving from place to place, armies growing up under different people with different ambitions. Squabbling with one another, the constant squabbling between the Generals. So, first the slaves through surprise got the upper hand in the north and then with the help incidentally of guns from Jamaica – which was then under British control – the French immediately, immediately recognising their common interest, sent over to British Governor of Jamaica asking for guns to help them, managed to get a much more disciplined force, managed to get their militia together and started to win against the slaves.What happened then is, that in the small and relatively contented plantation of Breda, where the planters had broken the rules and started to educate a very small section of their slaves, there was a coachman ... son of a coachman ... and the coachman was one that was always taught to read, who was called Toussaint. He was called Toussaint because he was born on All Saints Day. Slaves only had one name and his was Toussaint and in 1791 – and this is for the benefit of all those youth worshippers who get increasingly to annoy me as I ... as the years go on – he was forty-six years old. And at that time had taken part in not in any protest whatsoever, not in any protest of any kind. He was one of the very few slaves who was able to read and he had time to think. He’d read the Abbé Raynal, who had perhaps written the most savage condemnation of slavery in Saint Domingue. He’d read the works of Julius Caesar, which I suppose assisted him a bit when he came to think of fighting the French.And he joined the marauding rebel armies of the north – first as a medical auxiliary because he knew a little bit about medicine and increasingly as a leader and a negotiator. And within a matter of months he was ... had become, really by dint of the arguments with the squabbling generals, by the constant arguments that took place – chiefly verbal arguments in councils ... I mean ‘councils’ ... not elected councils but just great camp meetings ... great country mountain meetings in which masses of people came and listened to the debate. He asserted his authority over the other generals and one or two of the squabblers were put aside, and Toussaint became the spokesman for the slave army. So what you had was, the slave army, chiefly constituted in the north, militia assisted by troops which came from France, to assist the planters if you like – this is revolutionary France they are talking about – Commissioners and the like, chiefly to assist the planters and the two stand-off, if you like, is I understand the phrase we have to use this year. A stand-off between the slave army on one hand and the representatives of the planters on the other.Now, Toussaint’s strategy was quite simple. His enemy was the colonial power, France. And therefore, anything that would help him in his battle with the colonial power was to be used. And in particular, he was assisted at that time from the reviving imperialism in Spain. Because Spain thinking ... ooh, slave revolt on the western side on the island – maybe the slaves will knock out the French, then we can move in and knock out the slaves, and then we can have the whole of the island. So they started to give guns to Toussaint. And he held all the northern harbours, all the northern ports and harbours of Saint Domingue for Spain, which owned the east ... which occupied the eastern half of the island anyway."
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"content": "There is also incidentally and just interestingly in case anyone thinks these things are always clear and obvious, there was in if you like the slave mentality, the leadership of the slave mentality, a notion that there was something particularly wonderful about royalty. It’s something that if you read about the Peasant’s Revolt, actually finished off the Peasant’s Revolt, the idea that somehow – the King was alright but that everybody else, all these courtiers. You often see it, as a matter of fact, when people are criticising the royal family today: the Queen’s alright ... it’s all those people ... hangers on, you know and all those politicians I don’t like. The Queen’s alright. This notion was quite strong in the slave leadership ... even Toussaint felt like that a bit ... and therefore their feeling was not particularly moved by the ... activities ... the republican activities of the French Revolution. In so far as they were simply republican, directed against the King, then that seemed to Toussaint to be something that he didn’t particularly ... and he was impervious therefore to the seductive advances of the French Commissioners, the republican Commissioners which had gone out there. Sonthonax, General Laveaux, people like that, who were republicans and went originally to put down the slave revolt, began increasingly to say to Toussaint and to say with increasing sincerity it seemed ‘look, why are you enemies of France? France are on your side – why are you accepting guns from Spain, when all Spain want to do is to smash you down?’And all through the year 1793, there’s a stand-off going through 1792, all through the year 1793, this argument, this debate, about what the central strategy of the slave army should be ... should it be (with) against ... to continue against colonial and republican France or should it seek to change its views in the light of what was happening in Europe?Well the fact is that in 1794, the whole strategy changed. The strategy of supporting the Spaniards changed and came on to the side of France. Now why? What’s the explanation for that change in strategy? The first, and the crucial explanation, by far the most important explanation is what was going on in revolutionary France – it’s the explanation which is ... makes this story so very exciting for us today. It deals a little bit with the question ‘are white people always racialist?’ If that question is true ... if the answer to that question is yes ... ‘white people are always racialist’ then there’s not much hope for us, is there? Not much advance – the whole world condemned all the time, I suppose, to a permanent race war. Are white people always racialist? One answer comes out of the shift in strategy Toussaint and the slave army, in 1794. And the reason was this – the attitude of the French Revolution, 1794, you remember was shifting ... you know it had reached its peak ... it reaches its peak in the first few months of 1794 – it has moved ... it has been a shifting revolution all the time. Those people that I talked about earlier that were actually the planters, that had the plantations in Saint Domingue, people of that kind were being pushed aside and in their place new more rigorous revolutionaries were being put in place, and held ... held in place by, for the first time in history, or the first time in history certainly since London in the 1640s, the common people – the so-called common people, the people underground, the people without property, the sans culottes, beginning to come onto the historical stage. That was happening there. One of the results of that is this that the French Revolution, the language if you like of the revolution had directed itself against what it called ‘the aristocracy of wealth’, or for that matter ‘the aristocracy of religion’ – it had directed itself against those two things. But also crucial to the whole of that thinking, so inspiring to us today, was the notion also of the ‘aristocracy of the skin’.Now in 1794, February, at the very peak of the Revolution Saint Domingue was asked to send three delegates to the French Convention. The French Convention – and I repeat it again, controlled by the Jacobins, by the Mountain, by the left if you like – was asked to send three delegates. And they sent three, a black man, a mulatto and a white man came to represent Saint Domingue at the Convention. And the description there, in the account from the Convention gives us a clue as to why the strategy of the armies in Saint Domingue began to change.‘Camboulas rose:“Since 1789 the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of religion have been destroyed; but the aristocracy of the skin still remains. That too is now at its last gasp, and equality has been consecrated. A black man, a yellow man are about to join this Convention in the name of the free citizens of San Domingo.”The three deputies of San Domingo entered the hall. The black face of Bellay and the yellow face of Mills excited long and repeated bursts of applause. Lacroix (of Eure-et-Loire) followed:“The assembly has been anxious to have within it some of those men of colour who have suffered oppression for so many years. Today it has two of them. I demand that their introduction be marked by the President’s fraternal embrace.”Next day, Bellay, the Negro, delivered a long and fiery oration, pledging the blacks to the cause of the revolution and asking the Convention to declare slavery abolished. It was fitting that a Negro and an ex-slave should make the speech which would introduce one of the most important legislative acts ever passed by any political assembly. No-one spoke after Bellay. Instead, Levasseur (of Sarthe) moved a motion:"
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"content": "“When drawing up the constitution of the French people we paid no attention to the unhappy Negroes. Posterity will bear us a great reproach for that. Let us repair the wrong – let us proclaim the liberty of the Negroes. Mr. President, do not suffer the Convention to dishounour itself by a discussion.”The assembly arose in acclamation. The two deputies of colour appeared on the tribune and embraced while the applause rolled around the hall from members and visitors.’Well there was no discussion and slavery was abolished on February the third 1794 by the French Convention.Now news travelled slowly, especially from France to Saint Domingue when you are controlling a slave army which is out of touch with communications in the north. And therefore, it took a long time – no-one knows when the news of that act of the Convention – arrived with Toussaint L’Ouverture. But he probably heard it about May 1794. And on May the fourteenth 1794 he declared a complete shift in all his strategy. He changed his allegiance from the Spanish to the French. Seized exactly the same harbours that he’d taken for the Spanish up in the north, for the French. Declared himself for revolutionary France and took a second name. He took the French name L’Ouverture: the opening to liberty. The opening not only to liberty but the opening to an alliance between revolutionary France, who have declared us free, revolutionary France and revolutionary Saint Domingue. The word L’Ouverture has those two meanings – that’s why he called himself Toussaint L’Ouverture. And it’s true ... the truth is that it was in the nick of time that he did change his strategy because the second reason why he was considering changing his strategy was what was going on in Britain.And here now, we come back to our old friends William Wilberforce and William Pitt. Now I told you that in 1792, Wilberforce and Pitt moved a motion that slavery should be abolished. And in April 1792 an amendment was moved by the supporters of the great British planters of Jamaica and places of that kind. The amendment is a familiar one, which we come across all the time in parliamentary politics, that the bill should be passed in its entirety, with the addition of one word ... gradually. In other words, that slavery should gradually be done away with – that’s practical Fabian politics, isn’t it, which gets things done. Well, that was passed in April 1792, so actually they did have something there which said that they were for abolition of slavery. Then how long was gradually? How long was it to be? And one answer to that question was this:That Britain had now declared war with France and had observed what was going on in Saint Domingue. Namely, there was a slave revolt that wouldn’t go away. In fact it seemed to be gaining in strength all the time – and it even had a leader and a negotiator who was capable of negotiating with French Commissioners out there. And it looked as though that France was involved in a very serious situation. Now here is the crucial point. Wilberforce and Pitt were one-hundred percent against slavery, but the chief reason they were against slavery is that the main profits from slavery were going to the French. You see, there’s two points – and you can imagine them waking up at night and worrying about it: one, the obscenity of all those black people being yoked and put into the galleys and being taken and killed on the way and being thrown into the sea and thousands of people dying in the sea, and all that kind of thing. That’s obscene! That would wake you up at night. But even worse it would wake you up at night if somebody else is getting the profit from it.And this is the key problem that ... it was in Saint Domingue, was French, it was by far the biggest place where any profits were coming from slavery. And the British were running the slave trade! Those were Christian British people, captains singing ‘Oh God our help in ages past’ as they chuck the bodies into the sea. The British were actually providing the material, the human material, whereby the French were making extreme profits. Now that was ... that has the bitterness, the passion ... if you like ... the passion of a Christian factory owner, in Hull. The feeling, you know, like ... I remember, do you remember the passion about the atrocities in Kuwait, during the war. The passion ... how ... passionately people got so worked up about the atrocities. The same bourgeois passion ... switch on passion ... switch that one on. Passion! Why? Because the other thing that’s been switched off is the oil. Switch off the oil ... switch on the passion!"
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"content": "Now you see ... exactly the same thing here. They would have gone on being in favour of slave trade for the rest of their lives if only their competitors had not been making profits from it. And therefore the situation in Britain changed. The situation among the bourgeoisie, the rulers ... the rulers of Britain changed. And ... there was a war ... there was a war. What happened was that a British expedition was sent to San Domingo to take San Domingo both from the slaves and from the French. It was the biggest expedition that had ever left British shores. You don’t read about it in the history books. A much bigger expedition, by the way, than the expedition that went to the Peninsular war. You’ll have all read the Peninsular war. Discuss. Discuss Wellington’s campaign in the Peninsular war. Was it successful? Discuss its military tactics. Three hours. You remember, you’ve all dealt with that. What you haven’t dealt with is, what about the thousands and thousands of people that were sent to San Domingo by the British in 1794. And fought against the slave army from 1794 to 1798, in one of the biggest wars of that time that the British had ever been engaged in. No-one really knows anything about that.But I can tell you this – that during the period of that war the Abolition Society, the great movement to get rid of slavery, in this country practically petered out. Grateful to Robin Blackburn’s book, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, in that he has spelt ... for the first time ... gone into this in great detail and spelt out exactly what happened. There were two more attempts in 1795 and 1796 to get a bill through parliament – both of them were unsuccessful – neither of them were enthusiastically supported by the Prime Minister – the Abolition Society, that is the slave abolition society met twice in the three years between ’95 and ’97. In ’97 it didn’t meet at all and from 1792 to 1800, one million slaves were taken on British ships from Africa to the West Indies and the so called New World. That’s what happened in that period. All that enthusiasm and passion about slavery just dried up. Because for a moment ... a long moment ... for four long years of warfare ... it seemed ... the eyes of the British bourgeoisie gleamed with the prospect that they would get hold of the cotton and the indigo and the sugar and the coffee of Saint Domingue and the slaves that made it profitable, that made it so profitable. And therefore their attitude changed. And therefore, of course, what Toussaint can see – Jacobin France is freeing slaves but the British are coming to restore slavery and that is one of the reasons why he changed ... he changed his allegiance. 1794 to 1798 is the war with the British.In all military campaigning you won’t read of more extraordinary military exploits than were conducted by that slave army. They could move forty miles a day to the British ten. I mean, they could move with supplies at a speed which would leave the British lumbering in the back. And this was the greatest expeditionary force ever sent – with all the history of British imperialism behind it, all the history of British militarism behind it unable to deal at all with this slave army. And what’s extraordinary about Toussaint himself is not only his vitality and his ability to command his army in these circumstances, but also his extraordinary humanity.He wrote to Brigadier General John White, very accurately named, Brigadier General John White ... his attitude ... who was in charge of the British forces.“You have demeaned yourself in the eyes of this and future generations in allowing one of your commanders, the cowardly Lapointe to issue this order which could not have been issued without your knowledge: ‘No quarter for the brigands – take no prisoners’. And that in spite of the fact that I have given instructions to my commanders to treat all prisoners with humanity. I am only a black man, I have not had the advantage of the fine education the officers of His Britannic Majesty are said to receive, but were I to be guilty of so infamous an act I should feel I have sullied the honour of my country.”That was Toussaint to Brigadier White. I mean you shouldn’t write to Brigadier White if you’re a black man anyway but to be able to write like that indicates the kind of man he was and on April the 14th 1798 the British had had enough and Toussaint led a victorious march into the capital Port-au-Prince. The British had lost eighty thousand men in that expedition, forty thousand dead and forty thousand wounded or laid low forever by disease. That is more than the total lost in the Peninsular war and the British were driven out of Saint Domingue never to return again.And this story is only understood by understanding the constantly shifting background of the French Revolution. French Revolution has reached its peak and the French Revolution is in decline. And as the French Revolution comes into decline so all those people who had benefited from slavery now felt (not) unashamed to talk about their benefits of slavery. And now started to talk openly about the need to restore slavery in San Domingue. And they sent another Commissioner, a different kind of Commissioner to the ones that had been sent to treat with Toussaint when the Mountain was in charge of the Convention. They sent now the Directory, the people that took on after Robespierre and the others. The Directory, the five reactionary people who took over, sent another Commissioner called Hédouville, who fomented war between the Mulattos and the Blacks."
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"content": "The Mulattos, if you like, had always played the role ... if you like ... that the middle class play in the class battle, the weathercock that blows with the wind. The Mulattos ... as ... are almost detectable when the revolution in France is at its peak and allied with the forces of the slave army, the Mulattos hundred percent with the slave army. As the thing begins to subside the Mulattos, under very, very powerful and rigorous General called Rigaud ... a very, very find General ... broke off and under the influence of French bribery and French manipulation started a war against Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black army, which was perhaps of all this story the most awful and fratricidal war which went on all the way to 1801, and it wasn’t until January 1801 that the Mulatto army was finally defeated. And Toussaint, in order to celebrate his victory over the Mulattos, marches into the Spanish side of the island ... quickly conquers the Spanish side of the island ... and enters now victorious (army) into Santo Domingo.So, the position at the start of 1801 is that he has beaten off the first counter attack of the French Republic to his revolt. He has beaten ... when I say he, I mean he and the slave army, the slave army ... have beaten the full might of the biggest expeditionary force ever to leave the British Empire, he has beaten the Spanish Empire, he has beaten the Mulattos bribed by the French and he has abolished slavery. Not a bad job for nine years, I think you’ll agree!But ... and for a very short time then you have a period, 1801 to 1802, a short peace, in which the whip is banned, hours are controlled – nine hour day; the devastation of production, which of course has taken place in the period of the war, is, very quickly starts to be made good. In fact, I’m against describing utopias – and it certainly wasn’t a utopia ... ridiculous to describe it as a utopia. Nor could it conceivably have been described as a democracy. There were very few elections that took place anywhere at all. Toussaint L’Ouverture certainly as far as I know was never elected in any capacity what so ever. But it is extraordinary how just in the very short period of time, between 1801 and 1802, when he was left alone by the various imperialisms which he’d defeated, there was at that time something (which) completely different to anything that had taken place before. In the mind of Napoleon that had to be stopped as soon as possible.‘Napoleon’ – this is quotation from Ralph Korngold’s book on ... called Citizen Toussaint – ‘Napoleon asked what colonial system had produced the best results. He was told the system prevailing before the Revolution. Then, said Napoleon, the sooner we return to it the better’. And in much more determination that the Directory ... the Consulate ... the ... Napoleon set about the business of restoring slavery in Saint Domingue. He wrote to Decrès, the Minister of Marine, who was putting together an expedition to leave for Saint Domingue, “Everything must be prepared for the restoration of slavery, this is not only the opinion of the metropolis, but is also the view of England and other European powers. I am for the whites”, he said – “because I am white. I have no other reason”. Well he had plenty of other reasons, as a matter of fact, but he didn’t want to explain them. But that kind of argument appealed very much to the enemies of Napoleon, who were then ... at any rate in theory ... the British.And you’ll all have read in your examinations and history books, you’ll have read about the Peace of Amiens. You know, there was a peace in the middle of the Napoleonic war. There was a peace 1801, first of October there was a peace signed at Amiens. On the fourteenth of December, the same year, a French expedition sailed to restore slavery in Saint Domingue. One of the greatest French expeditions that had ever left the shores of France. Headed by General Dugua, General Humbert, who put ... who had actually tried to spark off the revolution in Ireland. General Boudet, of the Nile. General Boyet of the Nile – the hero of the Vendée, put down the peasants uprising in the Vendée. All these great Generals of the Revolution were in the expeditionary force that went to put ... to restore slavery and to knock out the ... revolution, the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.General Leclerc, Napoleon’s own son-in-law, declared ... who was put in charge, he was put in charge of the expedition and you can’t show greater faith in an expedition than putting your son-in -law in charge of it – said this: “All the niggers when they see an army will lay down their arms”. And the orders to the army as to what was to happen when the niggers have laid down their arms were as follows:‘All women who had consorted with blacks were to be executed; all education and discussion among blacks to be ended. There was to be no truck with any talk of rights of the blacks who have spilled French blood.’Now, Toussaint L’Ouverture, remember this, had declared himself for Revolutionary France. He had seen himself as part of the French Revolution. He was, as he said himself he was, a Black Jacobin. And he watches the greatest, huge expeditionary force, standing on one of the peaks in the northern Saint Domingue, watches this great expeditionary force coming – to do what? And it’s obvious that it’s coming to restore slavery. And therefore he has to realign once again. He has to think again about his strategy."
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"content": "And the last terrible chapter of this story is another dreadful, bitter war between this expeditionary force and the slave army during the first six months of 1802. After February, March 1802, five thousand of this great French force were in hospital and five thousand were dead. You’ll have read – if you read about this at all which you don’t, but if anyone had ... well you don’t in ordinary bourgeois history you don’t read about it at all – but if you do, you’ll have read that the French army did very well but it was laid low by Yellow Fever. You’ll read that this great force went there, they all got Yellow Fever and then they all came back again, that’s what you’ll read. What you won’t read is that in battle after battle just as the British had failed to cope with the fantastic power and force and energy of the slave army, so the French were unable to do so.And one of the reasons why the French were unable to do so is that they noticed that whenever they came up against a fortress, or whenever they came up close against the slave army they were greeted with the most wonderful renderings of precisely the songs which they were meant to be singing. So they would come up to Crête-à-Pierrot, the fort which was held by Dessalines, for months and months in a massive siege (of the French) of the fort in the centre of Haiti there, in the centre of Saint Domingue. And they would come up and about to sing La Marseillaise when suddenly the most magnificent blast of La Marseillaise would hit them from inside the fort ... the Ça Ira, the great songs of the French Revolution would come back at them from people – they would say “well ... that’s our song. What are they singing? That’s our song. What are they singing ‘Allons enfants de la patri’? We are ‘enfants de la patri’! Why? How are these people, who are not enfants, they are the niggers singing these things to us.”It confused people. It worried the ordinary soldiers that were sent out there. And, what worried them, of course, much more than that was that the military tactics and the military competence and the ability to handle weapons, and so on, was much, much, much greater than anything they had ever encountered before. So of course they resorted as all great armies do when they’re beaten in the field, they resorted to treachery. And what they did was they called on Toussaint to a meeting to say “let’s, let’s discuss this. It’s been a bit of a mistake. Let’s discuss this as a joint French people. Let’s discuss it” So, like a fool and advised not to do so by his advisors Toussaint went for a meeting with General Brunet on June the seventh 1802. And as he walked into the meeting he was immediately surrounded, disarmed and his bodyguard killed and he was imprisoned, put on a ship to France and imprisoned in a deep and dark dungeon in the Jura, on the Swiss border.And of course the idea was, and you’ll get this in all bourgeois mythology, is that all revolts are led by agitators. That agitators arise with great powers, powers which are something to do with the devil. Satanic, satanic powers which converge all in one person. And all you have to do is lop the head off the person – take the person away and all those powers leave the masses. That’s always constant, isn’t it. There’s strike – whose leading it! Whose ... find someone – execute them! And the strike will go away. Now this was the feeling about the slave revolt. And they were right in a way – that Toussaint L’Ouverture was the most remarkable person, but of course he was not the slave revolt. The slave revolt, the slogan of the slave revolt was ‘Liberty or Death!’ – which was exactly the position they were in. They either got rid of slavery or they died. And that was the strength of the slave revolt from the very first moment it started to be organised. And therefore the slave revolt continued after the imprisonment of Toussaint L’Ouverture. It continued, as a matter of fact with much greater ferocity. All that humanity which I described earlier, deserts the generals that take over from Toussaint L’Ouverture. General Christophe, General Dessalines, people of that kind. All those ... these people don’t show the humanity if you like. And why should they after all, when they have behaved that way to the leader who did show humanity? And therefore, the French, by the end of 1802, were driven out of Saint Domingue, and ever since then, Saint Domingue, Haiti for all the terrible things that imperialism had done to it, for all the unimaginable exploitation and poverty that exists there. Ever since then, Haiti has been ... Saint Domingue, whatever you want to call it, has been an independent country and there has never been a slave in that island since that time."
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"content": "Now that is the position ... just come back to those early questions that I asked. Slavery was abolished not by William Wilberforce. He had opposed the slave uprising. He’d opposed the slave uprising. He was opposed to the movement to get the British Army out of Saint Domingue because it was supporting slavery. Wilberforce was opposed to it. He hated radicals and revolutionaries of every kind, Wilberforce did. And in particular he hated Toussaint L’Ouverture. The man who represented in action all those passionate speeches which he’d made in the House of Commons was utterly detested. And therefore, the first lesson, the first and elementary lesson which flows up these two hundred years is that slavery wasn’t abolished by some bourgeois Tory MP, some bloody factory owner it was abolished because the slaves emancipated themselves. I mean, Marx uses that word ‘emancipate’ when he talks about the emancipation of labour in the famous declaration, the First International. But the slaves actually did emancipate themselves, the emancipation, the end of slavery starts with the victory of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s army. It goes on and on and on and it goes on for another several decades before the black slaves of the south of America have to fight a civil war to get rid of slavery there – but the self-emancipation is the central lesson. And the second central lesson so crucial to us is that they won it, they emancipated themselves, because they made common cause with the common people of revolutionary France.There are some books. Not many. There’s one in the Left Book Club called Citizen Toussaint by Ralph Korngold who is the biographer of Robespierre. That’s a very good book indeed. There’s a rather quaint little book which you might find by the Reverend John. R. [B]eard, Doctor of Divinity, 1853, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. A rather nice little book, not you understand about the French Revolution, of course, but it is a rather nice little book. There is a book by Wenda Parkinson called “This Gilded African”, which isn’t a bad book, came out about ten years ago. And we’ve got this wonderful history of slavery now by Robin Blackburn, which fills in some of the gaps that I’ve tried to fill in there; but a million miles, and Robin will ... not at all mind if he’s here ... he will forgive me at once for saying it, a million miles the best book, by far the best book about this question is the one that is called The Black Jacobins, by C.L.R. James – the man responsible for getting Frank Worrall captain of the West Indies cricket team. I tried to think of something more important about him to say, I mean he was a Trotskyist for many years but he did actually achieve in West Indian cricket the rights of the Blacks to control their own cricket. Anyone interested in that, whatever you’re interested ... C.L.R. James was the most magnificent writer. And this book which comes out in the late 30s, C.L.R. James from the Trotskyist tradition – writing a book about the mingling of the two revolutions – there it is – available – you can get it here. Anybody who hasn’t read that really has to testify to the almighty in some way or other.Now, Toussaint L’Ouverture himself, he died of pneumonia in that prison in the Jura, on the 4th of April 1803. And he died alone and old and nobody knows where he’s buried. As far as I know, there’s no plaque, there’s no burial ground, there’s no tomb, there’s no mausoleum, there’s no mummification. And that point was a point which interested the young poet William Wordsworth in 1803, who was himself tremendously inspired by the French Revolution – but his revolutionary enthusiasms were just on the turn in 1803. Just beginning to turn to the hideous reaction in which it ended up in the later period of the century. And somebody came along and he said, “You know, Toussaint L’Ouverture is dead, somewhere in Switzerland we know not where. He’s died and he’s not even buried somewhere.” And Wordsworth wrote what I think is his greatest sonnet. It’s one which you might not have learned by heart at school because I’m afraid to say that there is no reference in it to daffodils.TOUSSAINT! Thou most unhappy man of men!Whether the whistling rustic tend his ploughWithin thy hearing, or thy head be nowPillowed in some deep dungeon’s (eye)less den:Oh, miserable chieftain! Where and whenWill thy find patience? Yet die not, do thouWear rather in thy (brow) a cheerful brow:Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,Live, and take comfort. Thou has left behindPowers that will work for thee. Air, earth and skies:There’s not a breathing of the common windThat will forget thee. Thou hast great allies:Thy friends are exultations, agoniesAnd love, and man’s unconquerable mind. Top of the pageLast updated on 6.7.2013"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThe government that devoured itself(July/August 1995)Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 188, July/August 1995, pp. 4–5.Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The early summer of 95 will surely be remembered by all socialists as a time for glorious spectator sport. There seems no need any longer to say or do anything against the Tory administration. Like strange creatures from Greek legend, Tory ministers seem determined to devour themselves.Leading the field is the Prince of Crassness himself, the prime minister John Major, who in a fit of public petulance for which them is no parallel in the history of the British parliament, suddenly decided to give up his job as Tory leader and seek a new mandate from his narrow and punchdrunk electorate, the 327 Tory MPs.First to pick up the gauntlet was the far right neanderthal, John Redwood, whose total programme is to cut deeper still into the meagre benefits of the poor – and to bring back the hangman’s rope. The Review goes to press as the outcome of this bizarre contest remains uncertain, but lurking in the wings is the old fox Michael Heseltine, a politician so unprincipled that he is quite prepared to make common cause with Michael Portillo, another far right fanatic even more sinister than Redwood.If Major beats Redwood substantially, he and his lame duck administration will limp on at least as far as the Scott report, scheduled for October. If the first ballot is indecisive, the two Michaels seem the most likely to reap the prize.The Tory troubles, we are told, are caused by their long period in office. This is nonsense. The Tories happily and unitedly cling to office as long as they can. Their current discontent is caused by the inability of their economic system to solve its own dreadful crises – their ‘economic recovery’ for instance, on which so much of their rhetoric is now based, is disintegrating in front of their eyes. The tax cuts they promised turn out to be tax increases. Their ‘remedies’ – union bashing and privatisation – have been employed to the full, with no noticeable benefit to anyone except the mega rich.No longer able to balance their books by bashing unions and the poor, they have turned to bashing the hallowed middle classes. Even mortgage relief, that enormous Thatcherite subsidy for homeowners, has been breached. In anguish as they contemplate losing their seats, Tory MPs lash out at any target which presents itself. Europe and foreigners everywhere, the BBC, each other.For Socialist Review readers who have been exposing this crisis, and predicting its political consequences for years, it is tempting in these times to sit back like sadists at a wrestling match between unbacked and hated contestants, and to enjoy every injury inflicted by one Tory leader on another. Such delightful abstention, however, misses the real question – how and why are these Tories still in office?Every moment of their survival means further inroads into the living standards of the workers and the poor, further grotesque riches in high places and further disillusionment on the left. And while it is fun indeed to watch the Tories tearing themselves apart, there is no guarantee that the infighting on its own will bring the Tories down. They are entitled, if left alone, to go on until the spring of 1997: nearly two more terrible years.The plain truth is that the Tories are still there because of the spinelessness of the Labour leadership and the TUC. While the people turn against Thatcherism and all its works, the Blair leadership of Labour turns towards it, equating in its negative rhetoric ‘old Labour’ and ‘the new right’, as if nationalisation, a free health service, comprehensive education and a trade union movement unshackled by Tory laws were as great a menace as capitalism. This despicable equation lies behind the truce which has been offered to the Tories not just by Labour but by the TUC, which has watched the dismemberment of its own movement with detached passivity.Even a fraction of the protests of the weaker and less organised trade union movements in Italy and in France in recent months would have driven this government from office and spared us the ridiculous gavotte now being danced by the absurd and discredited Tories. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWilson – the man who murdered reformism(28 September 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 90, 28 September 1968, p. 2.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 24–5.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IF WILSONISM means anything at all, it means the collapse of Labour’s reformism: the end of the idea that the British Labour Party stood, in however small a way, for the aspirations of the British working class against their oppressors.Harold Wilson, since he entered parliament and politics in 1945, has seen through the various processes which led to the end of that reformism. The Labour Party manifesto for the 1945 election proclaimed an advance to socialism on two fronts: first by the nationalisation of the sub-structure of British industry – coal, steel, power, transport, gas, electricity; second, by an advance in social welfare provisions.To some extent at least these promises were kept. Coal, steel and most of transport was nationalised.Some welfare provisions were enacted. By 1950 Wilson and his associates were claiming that these policies had ‘created’ full employment: that any dismantling of them would mean a return to the 1930s and to slump.A new slogan decorated Labour Party banners: Towards Equality! was the name given to the executive policy statement of 1956, and all the Labour leaders, including Wilson, unleashed a stream of propaganda aimed at cutting public ownership out of the programme and putting in its place a vision of a decent, free, egalitarian capitalism.The 1959 election was fought on old Fabian slogans for doing better by the old, the unemployed and the young. It cut no ice.The election was lost by 100 seats, and the Labour leaders searched around for another ‘rethink’.The inspiration came to them from overseas, in America, where, in Wilson’s words, ‘under a new and youthful president, they are flexing their muscles once again. They are looking to New Frontiers.’Old Frontiers like helping the old, the sick, the unemployed, the badly-housed had clearly to be forsaken. What was needed was ‘a new leadership’ – Kennedy-style, dynamic, abrasive, gritty, chunky which would – to quote Wilson’s famous phrase in Signposts for the Sixties – ‘clear the dead wood out of the boardrooms’.Similarly, in foreign policy, opposition to Dulles’ anti-Communist foreign policy no longer attracted votes. Dulles’ policies suddenly became accepted by the Labour Party for the unanswerable reason that they were being carried out by Kennedy.Old loyalties and old sentiments die hard, and the new broom did not sweep out all the cobwebs from Labour’s policy. At the 1962 Conference the party stood firm by old imperialist traditions (the Commonwealth) against new capitalist aspirations (the Common Market), and, for a brief moment, the party even opposed the control of Commonwealth immigrants.But, as soon as Wilson became leader, most of these inconsistencies were sorted out. Immigration control, for instance, suddenly became part of Labour’s programme.And, to the hysterical cheers of the Labour left, Wilson led the party firmly rightwards – away from the welfare reformism of 1959 to the new dynamism of 1964.It is perhaps fortunate for historians that, in the midst of all his hectic talk about technology and change, Wilson paused for a moment to define socialism.‘Socialism’ he told an audience in Birmingham in January, 1964, ‘means applying a sense of purpose to our national life, economic purpose, social purpose, moral purpose. Purpose means technical skill ...’Socialism, in short, means applying technical skill to our national life, exactly the same as capitalism.For the chief priority of modern capitalism over the world is the application of the most advanced methods of technology in order to defeat competitors. It is this need which is driving national capitalism into greater and greater solidarity, monopoly and merger, and, as the margins allowed by the rebuilding of Germany and Japan and a permanent arms economy become narrower, to take increasingly confident swipes at the working class.What has happened since 1964 has relegated all talk of welfare reforms to the realms of fantasy. The reforms have either been abandoned, like the promise to build 500,000 houses by 1970; or put into effect and then rescinded (like the abolition of prescription charges); or enacted in a manner which makes them useless (like the Rent Act); or reversed to make the situation even worse than it was under the Tories (like the decision to postpone the school-leaving age).Incomes policy, productivity bargaining, balance of payments surpluses are now trumpeted abroad as the grand achievements of a socialist government!The supreme achievement of Harold Wilson has been his ability to proclaim such transparently capitalist policies as stark necessities, not only forced upon British Labour but also adapted by them in the most pragmatically socialist manner. It requires only for the 1968 Labour Conference to set the seal on the whole grisly process with the annual ritual – the standing ovation. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020"
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"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDemocracyA grand delusion(November 2003)From Socialist Review, No.279, November 2003, p.17.Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Capitalism as economic democracy? Paul Foot has heard it all beforeFor at least a hundred years there has been a continuous and hard-fought struggle between capitalism and democracy. Now a miraculous solution has been discovered by New Labour in the shape of its dynamic secretary of state for trade and industry, Patricia(n) Hewitt. Capitalism and democracy, she asserts in her new pamphlet A Labour Economy: are we nearly there yet?, are the same thing!There was a time when Patricia was a committed social democrat. She was general secretary of the National Council of Civil Liberties, which was founded in the main by stalwarts of the Communist Party in 1934 to defend the basic liberties of British citizens. Then she was press secretary to Neil Kinnock when he was leader of the Labour Party. Then she was a founder of a New Labour think tank called the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which in turn set up a Commission for Social Justice under a Labour peer (and director of the union-busting Daily Mirror) Lord Borrie. On the day John Smith died in May 1994, Hewitt became a director of research at Andersen Consulting, then firmly attached to the US-based accountants Arthur Andersen. Hewitt left Andersen in 1996, but not before the firm had arranged a special conference in Oxford at which almost a hundred Labour front benchers were lectured by City experts on the importance of governing in tune with business. As soon as the New Labour government took office in 1997, Hewitt, by now an MP for Leicester, was rapidly promoted to her present high cabinet office. As she scaled the heights of office, the Labour government released Arthur Andersen from their ban (imposed by the Tory government under Thatcher) from all government work because of the firm’s dubious relationship with the crooked entrepreneur John De Lorean. Not long afterwards Arthur Andersen was disgraced in the Enron scandal, and its business was wound up and shared out between the other accountancy moguls.This glittering history had an electric effect on the cool new secretary of state. She rapidly revised her old-fashioned views on social democracy. Her department of state became, in the view of Bill Morris, the not very radical general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, effectively a subsidiary of the Confederation of British Industry. Decision after decision from the department favoured the bosses and by the same token infuriated the unions. Now the secretary of state has exalted this slide into reaction in a new pamphlet published by her old comrades in the IPPR.The pamphlet takes up the familiar line that the workers already own a lot of industry through their pension funds and investments in insurance companies. A Labour government, she asserts, can pass laws to ‘encourage’ those funds and their trustees to use their clout to force the corporations into fairer and more democratic policies. The problem with this theory is that no Labour law has a hope of democratising the trustees that control these funds. As was horrifically demonstrated by the case of that heroic Kinnock supporter Robert Maxwell, the employers and their class can easily buy off and corrupt the trustees of their pension funds, and the insurance millions are even more closely and tightly controlled by City slickers. Any law to try to democratise these autocratic giants can be sidestepped or suppressed by a flick of the capitalist tiller.Much more disastrous than this ancient remedy is the objective that inspires Hewitt’s pamphlet. This is that Labour Party members, if only they would concentrate on business and entrepreneurs, can lead us all to the glittering prize of an ‘economic democracy’. Capitalism itself, she suggests, contains within it the essence of democracy. This is an argument often paraded by capitalists. The very dynamic of the market, they argue, is essentially democratic. The choice offered to consumers by the variety of goods and services for sale – and the fact that they choose what to buy and use – ensures a form of democracy in the economy. The problem with this argument is obvious. If income and earnings are grossly unequal, as they are in all capitalist economies, then the whole principle of democratic choice of goods and services is corrupted from the outset. The choice for someone with wealth is entirely different to that for someone with no money. Indeed for the latter there is no choice at all. The fundamentally undemocratic nature of the system becomes much clearer in the facts about control of the system. The idea that a man who owns four newspapers and a couple of engineering firms is equally represented in society with anyone who works in those factories or reads those newspapers is quite obviously absurd. It is the wholly undemocratic distribution of wealth and control of undertakings that drives the capitalist world, and ensures for instance that the trustees of pension funds and directors of insurance companies remain absolutely true to the ‘principles’ of the stockmarket. Capitalism is intrinsically, irretrievably undemocratic. Nothing helps the capitalists more than the statements of trade union leaders and Labour ministers that the system is fundamentally democratic. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004"
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"content": "Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurry WeissTrotskyism Today(Fall 1960)From International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No.4, Fall 1960, pp.106-110..Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Some of Trotsky’s admirers say his ideas have no current relevance. A look at the competing tendencies in today’s international labor movement tells a much different storyTWENTY years after the murder of Leon Trotsky by a Kremlin agent in Mexico, August 21, 1940, there is more reason than before his death to believe that the ideas and movement he represented will play a decisive role in the epoch in which we live, the epoch of the revolutionary transformation of society from capitalism to socialism.The opponents of Trotskyism will, of course, vigorously object to this proposition. While many, including some who admire Trotsky as an individual, are willing to grant that he possessed a rare and magnificent genius and accomplished great works in his time, they insist that the ideas of Trotsky and the movement that survived him have little, if any, bearing on the world today.Isaac Deutscher, for example, who has done truly brilliant and tireless work in excavating the truth about Trotsky from under a mountain of Stalinist lies, regards Trotsky’s efforts to build the Fourth International, in contrast to his previous achievements, as a piece of inexplicable folly doomed in advance to failure.Trotsky himself had a different view of the place his struggle for the Fourth International had in the totality of his life’s work.While exiled in Norway and France in 1935, the monstrous spectacle of the Moscow Trials unfolded before Trotsky’s eyes. An entire generation of Russian revolutionary leaders, constituting the great majority of the Leninist cadre that led the Bolshevik revolution, was being destroyed. Trotsky understood the meaning of this better than anyone. The Stalinist bureaucracy aimed not simply at the physical extermination of the Leninist vanguard but above all at the annihilation of Leninist ideas. For the Stalinist usurpers, the ideas of Leninism, which after Lenin’s death they called “Trotskyism,” were a threat to their power that had to be buried along with its living representatives.Under these conditions Trotsky regarded the work of building the Fourth International as pre-eminent. It meant nothing less than the struggle for the continuity of Marxism. In his 1935 Diary, March 25, he wrote:“The work in which I am engaged now, despite Its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life – more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other ... The collapse of the two internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third Internationals.”Philistines will rub their eyes in astonishment at such a statement. How Trotsky could compare his work in small propaganda circles; the painful rebuilding of contact and correspondence with tiny, isolated and hounded groups of oppositionists; the drafting of theses and resolutions for conferences attended by a handful of people; with his celebrated role in the October insurrection and the Civil War is beyond their comprehension. Trotsky, however, knew the indispensable role of ideological preparation and the building of revolutionary cadres in preparing for socialist victories. TREMENDOUS events have taken place since 1935: the Spanish Civil War; the general strike in France in 1936; World War II, the defeat of the Hitlerite invasion of the Soviet Union; the victory of the Chinese Revolution; the vast sweep of the anti-imperialist, colonial revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America; the enormous growth of Soviet economy; the default of the post-war revolutionary attempts of the working class in Western Europe; the recreation of conservative bourgeois regimes in West Germany and France; the return of the Tories in England; the social transformation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet orbit effected by bureaucratic and military means; the independent revolutionary working class struggles for socialist democracy in East Germany, Poland and Hungary; the cold war and the nuclear arms race; the prolonged prosperity in the United States accompanied by an unprecedented witch hunt and the relative quiescence of the labor movement; the new upsurge of the Negro struggle marked by the Southern sit-in movement; the wave of revolutionary events signalized by the June movement of workers and students in Japan, the most highly industrialized country of Asia.How does the program of Trotskyism stand up in the light of these events? Or more precisely, how does the program of Trotskyism, in comparison with the programs of other tendencies in the working class, stand up in relation to the world situation today?An objective balance sheet of these events will show that on the whole the socialist revolution has scored major advances and that imperialism has been seriously weakened. But it has by no means been an even or unbroken process. Not a few defeats have been suffered by the working class, as the recent victory of De Gaulle in France demonstrates. Capitalism has recouped some of its losses. It is sufficient to note that as a result of the betrayal of the working class by the reformist Labor party leaders in England the golden opportunity offered by the Labor victory in 1945 for a combined movement against imperialism in the colonial countries and in an advanced capitalist country was lost. Instead of such a favorable development, the treachery of the Labor leaders, allowed the Tories to regain power and thereby give new power and thrust to the Western imperialist drive towards World War III."
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"content": "Moreover, the default of the Labor party in England reinforced the blockade of the Chinese revolution, compelling China to develop its socialist revolution while cut off from the main centers of industrial power in the world. It is only with the new developments in Japan as well as the symptoms of a left wing rebirth in England that the shifting of the center of gravity of the socialist revolution to the most advanced industrial countries is again on the order of the day, and with this comes the prospect of freeing the revolutions in the economically underdeveloped areas from the terrible bureaucratic deformations and distortions imposed upon them by inherited poverty and backwardness.In our view, the basic premise on which the Fourth International was formed, the need to solve the crisis of proletarian leadership, remains fully operative today. To bring about the definitive victory of the socialist revolution and thereby avert the catastrophe capitalism threatens to inflict on humanity, the working class requires a revolutionary program and leadership. The program of Trotskyism, which is essentially the fundamental ideas of Marxism as continued by Lenin and enriched by the Russian Revolution, represents the revolutionary tendency within the working class. Trotskyism has, in our opinion, continued, applied and further developed this body of principle and experience. The Trotskyist program has been confirmed by all the successes of the socialist revolution, and the need for this program has been underscored by the failures of the revolution. TROTSKYISM, therefore, stands in opposition to the reformist and class collaborationist tendencies in the working class which rest upon labor bureaucracies of diverse types. Since 1923, the reformist tendencies have divided into two fundamental groups – Stalinism, based on the Soviet bureaucracy, and Social Democracy, based on the bureaucracy of the labor movement in capitalist countries. We can examine the program and function of Trotskyism only in relation to the other two tendencies – Stalinism and Social Democracy.There are two interrelated historical tasks confronting the peoples of the world:The abolition of capitalism in its chief industrial centers as well as in the former colonial possessions of imperialism;The democratization of economic, social and political life in the countries that have overthrown capitalism, a process which will simultaneously realize the program of socialist democracy and give enormous impetus to the economic development of these countries.These two tremendous tasks go hand in hand. Every victory against capitalism relieves the pressure of hostile imperialist encirclement of the workers states. This pressure, and the inherited economic backwardness are the chief causes for the growth of bureaucracy and the stifling of workers democracy. And every victory of the Soviet orbit workers against the bureaucracy and for socialist democracy helps to clear the way for the revolutionary regroupment of the working class in capitalist countries and thereby promotes the socialist revolution.If the existing tendencies predominating in the working class were carrying through these tasks or have shown capabilities for this, then there would be no historical necessity for a separate Trotskyist program, movement and leadership. However, since Trotsky’s death, neither the Social Democracy nor Stalinism has so changed their characteristics as to eliminate the necessity for a genuine Marxist leadership. In the advanced industrial countries the Social Democracy, seconded by the Stalinists, do not mobilize the workers in the struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, they are in league against the working class in their search for alliances with “peaceful and progressive” capitalists.In the Soviet bloc countries, despite all the progressive changes and reforms since Stalin’s death, the Stalinist bureaucracy remains the principal obstacle to the introduction of socialist democracy into Soviet life. And the Social Democracy, which is completely subservient to the cold-war Western imperialist alliance, serves to promote the continued power of the Soviet bureaucratic caste by helping to prolong the pressure of capitalist encirclement on the workers states.The Trotskyist movement, on the other hand, exerts all its efforts to promote the independent action of the working class against the rule of the monopolists in capitalist countries and above all in its central strongholds. And it supports by all its efforts the working class, the youth and the intellectuals in their fight to gain democratic control over the economy and political institutions of the Soviet orbit.Despite the indubitable disparity in their official influence, the existence of the three main tendencies in the working class movement, in which Trotskyism stands opposed to the other two, is generally recognized. This is confirmed by the fact that our opponents are compelled, at least tacitly, to accept this framework, since in their opposition to Trotskyism they invariably take up positions ranging themselves behind Stalinism or Social Democracy. Conversely, those who break with Stalinism are constrained to move towards Trotskyism, or, in the opposite direction – towards Social Democracy. The same holds true for currents breaking away from Social Democracy – they move either towards Stalinism or Trotskyism.The point is that each of the three tendencies represent classes and social strata deeply rooted in the social relations of our times and are not arbitrarily designated on the basis of some superficial and secondary distinguishing characteristics. IN THE tradition of Marxism, the central idea of the Trotskyist program is that the working class can gain its emancipation and free humanity from the degradation of class society only through its own revolutionary action and organization. This simple though profound principle means that the working class must at all times fight for its political independence from the parties of the capitalists and middle class. At the summits of the workers movement, however, the enormous economic, social and cultural pressure of capitalism operates daily to produce and reproduce a privileged crust of bureaucrats which systematically separates itself from the class interests, ideology and political needs of the working class it is supposed to represent. The fact is that capitalism continues to rule in the greater part of the world today only by virtue of the fact that it maintains its domination over the working class, directly and indirectly, through these bureaucratic formations."
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"content": "The forward march of the socialist revolution, therefore, depends on the capacity of the working class to throw off the bureaucracy, free itself from the bureaucratic ideology of subservience to capitalism and forge its own authentic instruments of struggle.The argument against Trotskyism turns chiefly on this question: Must the working class create its own party and its own program in order to win the struggle for socialism? Or can it be done at a cheaper price as the ideologists of Stalinism and Social Democracy assure us, namely, through reliance on one or another section of the labor bureaucracy?Those in the orbit of Social Democracy, in the US for example, will say: Look at the power of the labor movement with its seventeen million members and all the gains it has won under its present leadership of Meany and Reuther. Who are you Trotskyists to say that further social progress cannot be made, including bringing about socialism, through this type of leadership? Those in the orbit of the Stalinists argue: Look at the power of the Soviet Union, its industrial and technological progress. All this was accomplished under the leadership of Stalin and his successors. Who are you Trotskyists to say the full victory of socialism throughout the world cannot be achieved under this leadership?There are a number of flaws in this type of argument. It operates on the assumption that the officials “in charge” of a union or a workers state are obviously responsible for all progressive achievements of the working class. Plausible as this formal view may be to middle class mentality, it is far from being a fact. Very often the given officialdom had little to do with the basic struggles of the working class that achieved progressive results. Often the officials of today were the most zealous opponents of the struggles that led to progress. After the opposition of these officials had been broken by the mass action of the workers and after the wave of militant struggle has receded, the officials, old and new, swarm into the places of power, organize the privilege-seeking apparatus men and, taking advantage of a period of lull and passivity “take charge” by ousting the militant leadership that stood at the head of the struggle. This cycle is familiar to everyone who has experienced the ebbs and flows of the mass movement – whether on the scale of strikes and unions or revolutions and workers states.Furthermore, history is replete with examples of how the most powerful organizations of the working class were utterly destroyed and all past achievements wiped out because of the false policies of the allegedly all-wise and all-powerful officials. The example of how fascism destroyed the German working class organizations while its leadership floundered helplessly should forever be a reminder to shun the dogma that those currently at the head of the movement must know best. THE basic reason for the defeat in Germany was the people’s front policy of the Social Democracy which led the majority of the working class. According to this policy, called the “Iron Front,” the German workers were told to rely on the bourgeois liberals to stop fascism. The Stalinists on the other hand led the revolutionary workers into the blind alley of its then ultra-left sectarian policies of “social fascism” (which declared the Social Democracy and not fascism to be the main danger) and the “united front from below” (which ultimatistically demanded in effect that the Social Democratic workers leave their party if they wanted united action with the Communist workers).The Stalinist policy proved incapable of winning the German workers from the disastrous course of the people’s front. The liberals buckled in the face of Hitler’s drive to power. The Social Democratic leaders, to the very end refused to turn from its reliance on parliamentary deals with the liberal capitalists; they refused to heed Trotsky’s insistent warnings and his urgent proposal that the Communist and Social Democratic parties form a working class united front of action from top to bottom in order to stop the Hitlerites. The Stalinists likewise turned a deaf ear to the Trotskyist united front proposal and dubbed it “left social fascism.” Thus the German working class was paralyzed by its leadership and Hitlerism triumphed.Few today will dispute the correctness of the Trotskyist program for Germany. Few will deny the fact that the false policies of both the Stalinists and Social Democrats led to the greatest catastrophe in history. The point is, however, that the very policy that led to the downfall of the German labor movement is today still promulgated not only by the Social Democracy but also by the Stalinists.In every capitalist country in the world the Stalinists assist the Social Democracy in saddling the working class with the treacherous policy of relying on the liberal bourgeoisie in the struggle against the threat of war, reaction and fascism. Even the cold war has not broken this common front. Where the Social Democrats refuse to admit the Stalinists into the sacred precincts of its coalition with the liberals, the Stalinists base their whole policy on the hope of persuading the Social Democrats to relax their adherence to the cold war sufficiently to allow them to become partners in the reformist class collaboration game.Meanwhile the Communist parties led by the Stalinists are educated in the spirit of parliamentary reformism and are utterly incapable of revolutionary action. The rise to power of De Gaulle in France, without any effective opposition from the working class is an ominous warning signal. IF WE shift our attention from the current political to the theoretical plane, matters are, if possible, even worse. Both the Social Democrats and Stalinists have, each in their own way, completely abandoned even a pretense of adhering to the revolutionary Marxist doctrines. The Social Democrats of Germany have gone so far as to explicitly renounce the goal of socialism and include private capitalist ownership of the means of production in their new program. The right wing British Laborites are maneuvering to attain the same end."
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"content": "Stalinist “theory” has fared no better. Beginning with the invention of the theory of “socialism in one country” by Stalin himself in 1924, the barrier to a formal renunciation of the revolutionary class struggle program of Marxism was removed. The latest theoretical expression of this process took place at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party where Khrushchev’s proposals to scuttle Lenin’s concept of imperialism and the revolutionary road to power were adopted.The theoretical bankruptcy of Stalinism and Social Democracy is strikingly manifested in the fact that neither of them even professes to offer any theory of the nature and function of labor bureaucracies. The Stalinist theoreticians don’t even recognize the fact that a labor bureaucracy exists in capitalist countries. There are only “progressive” and “conservative” labor officials and unhealthy bureaucratic practices are occasionally mentioned. But the Leninist concept of the Social Democratic bureaucracy as a privileged social caste resting on the relatively satisfied and corrupted labor aristocracy, directly and indirectly bribed by some of the super profits of imperialism, has long ago been abandoned in the interests of partnership with the labor bureaucracy. At the same time the Stalinists are, of course, incapable of countenancing a theory of the Soviet bureaucracy. In his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev admitted a whole number of monstrous crimes of the Stalinist regime. But he attributed these crimes to Stalin’s falling victim to the “cult of personality.” He didn’t dare answer the question: what kind of a regime would support such unspeakable crimes? To tackle such a question Khrushchev would first of all have to admit the existence of a bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union. This would lead to uncovering the fact that Lenin himself was a “Trotskyist”; that before his death he was preparing an open struggle in his own name against the bureaucracy in the Soviet State and Communist party; that he insistently urged Trotsky to open the fight when illness prevented him from carrying out his plan; and that Trotsky continued the struggle after Lenin’s death.Khrushchev preferred to repeat the Stalinist lies about Trotskyism.“We must affirm that the party fought a serious fight against the Trotskyists ...” he said, “and that it disarmed ideologically all enemies of Leninism. The ideological fight was carried on successfully ... Here Stalin played a positive role.” IT ISN’T true that Trotskyism was defeated ideologically in the Soviet Union. It was crushed by force. How else explain the fact that the struggle against Trotskyism employed the almost unlimited resources of the Soviet state under Stalinism to organize a massive slander campaign, falsify history, imprison and exile thousands of oppositionists, expel tens of thousands of Trotskyist supporters from the factories, the schools and the party, and then organize assassinations of Trotsky, his secretaries arid members of his family? If Trotskyism was defeated ideologically why was it necessary to organize the infamous Moscow Trial frame-ups?To answer these questions Khrushchev would be opening the dykes to a torrent of critical reexamination of the whole history of Stalinism, its social roots and its theoretical premises. Better keep silent even if it leads to such ludicrous consequences as are evident in the latest revised edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union where the old lies about Trotskyism are partly retained up to the point when the Moscow Trials took place. The Khrushchev historians then introduce a quaint innovation. They simply don’t mention the Moscow Trials! Such a glaring omission eloquently discloses how the specter of Trotskyism haunts the consciousness of the Soviet bureaucracy today. And for good reason. Trotskyism represents the inevitable program and banner of the gigantic struggles for socialist democracy that lie ahead. We have only seen the faint anticipation of such struggles in East Germany, Poland and Hungary. When the industrial workers of the Soviet Union, who are imbued with a socialist consciousness, begin to raise their demands for equality and democracy, they will find in Trotskyism the explanation of the bureaucratic regime and the guide to a revolutionary socialist struggle against it.Naturally, the Social Democracy is likewise incapable of offering a theory of labor bureaucracy since such a theory would only explain the social and economic basis for its own birth, growth and imminent death. It has no more need for such a theory than capitalism has for the Marxist theory. Nor can the Social Democrats accept the Trotskyist theory of the Soviet bureaucracy. If the Social Democrats viewed the Stalinist power in the Soviet Union as based on a bureaucracy, they would have to answer a bureaucracy of what? This would lead to the “danger” of understanding that Stalinism is a bureaucratic growth on a workers state and that despite Stalinism this workers state must be defended against imperialism. The Social Democratic theorists resolve the problem by designating the Soviet bureaucracy as a “class” possessing features more reactionary than capitalism. They thereby justify their allegiance to Western imperialism in the cold-war “crusade for freedom.”Thus neither in political program nor in theory do the Social Democrats and Stalinists offer the working class an explanation of the world today or the way to achieve socialism. HERE we must deal with a recurrent challenge to Trotskyism by critics who demand to know: Don’t the revolutionary transformations in Eastern Europe and the leadership of successful revolutions by the Yugoslav and Chinese Communist parties disprove the Trotskyist thesis that Stalinism is incapable of leading the socialist revolution? Walter Kendall, a writer for the British Independent Labor party paper, Socialist Leader, offers a typical statement of this challenge October 31 in an article, The Crisis of Trotskyism:"
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"content": "“In the China of the late twenties and early thirties Stalin’s policy, the Comintern thesis (of supporting Chiang Kai-shek) went down to utter ruin. Trotsky’s conclusion that the Chinese Revolution could triumph only under the leadership of the proletariat with the Communist party at its head seemed proven beyond all doubt. [In] 1948-49 the Chinese Community party IN DEFIANCE OF STALIN’S EDICTS [emphasis W.K.] carried the long drawn out civil war to a triumphant conclusion. A largely peasant army occupied China’s proletarian centers and established a revolutionary government in which a sta-tized economy controlled by the Communist party replaced the old regime ... The Trotskyists whose critique of Stalinism had previously seemed watertight now found themselves in a dilemma. The Chinese Communist party had achieved the impossible ... under Stalinist rule it had conquered power. The economy was statized. How then characterize Chinese society? China, replied the Trotskyists, is a workers state ... Yet if a workers’ revolution can be carried out by peasants without the workers lifting a finger to help themselves, not just Stalinism but also orthodox Trotskyism collapses. China poses a problem which Trotskyism has so far been unable to solve.”Let us see. The Chinese Communist party did not act according to Stalinist theory and practice when it led the revolution to power. Why then should this create an insoluble dilemma for Trotskyism? If, by following the Stalinist program the Chinese Communist party had overthrown imperialism, landlordism and capitalism, then indeed it would be necessary to reexamine the Trotskyist theory of Stalinism. But what are the facts? Kendall himself indicates them. The Chinese CP “in defiance of Stalin’s edicts” took the power. According to the recently “leaked” records of the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, published in the Minneapolis Tribune August 22, 1960, Stalin, in his meeting with Churchill and Truman, referred to Chiang Kai-shek as “the best of the lot.” Stalin said, he “saw no other possible leader and that, for example, he did not believe that the Chinese Communist leaders were as good or would be able to bring about the unification of China.” Clearly the Kremlin wanted the Chinese CP to continue its ruinous policy of working for a coalition with the Chiang regime. It was only when the situation became so rotten ripe for the overthrow of the inwardly decomposing and demoralized Nationalist government, and when the elemental movement of the agrarian revolution swept the Chinese CP leaders along with it that they could no longer abide by Stalin’s directives. This is the simple fact about how and why the Chinese CP took power. A similar process obtained in the Yugoslav revolution. The Yugoslav CP conquered power despite the Kremlin’s repeated efforts to change its course away from the formation of Proletarian Brigades, away from the struggle against the Michaelovitch forces supported by British imperialism, and away from all social revolutionary measures where the Communist partisans held power. As a matter of fact in Yugoslavia the Kremlin gave military aid to the bourgeois forces that were shooting at the partisans. Thus the world headquarters of Stalinism was on the opposite side of the class barricades of a Stalinist party leading a revolution.The unique combination of contradictory processes in these revolutions has upset – not Trotskyism – but the schematic concept our critics impute to Trotskyism. They argue, for example, that the working class didn’t stand at the head of the Chinese revolution as it did in the Russian. And doesn’t this upset all of Marxism? No. The basic norms of the Marxist theory are never realized in ideal form. The Russian Revolution also appeared to violate Marxist norms when the socialist revolution took place first in the most backward country of Europe instead of the most advanced. Lenin rejected the Menshevik injunction that the October Revolution was an impermissible adventure because it violated this schema. He explained how the norm is realized through an extended process and above all by revolutionary struggle. We shall see how the Chinese revolution while masking and distorting the role of the working class, gave expression to it in the distorted form of its Stalinized party.The Trotskyist movement never envisaged that the breakup of the world Stalinist monolith would follow some preconceived blueprint. The fact that the Yugoslav and Chinese Communist parties had to tear loose from their Stalinist moorings in order to lead socialist revolutions did more than prove that Stalinism is incompatible with revolutionary leadership. These events served to profoundly deepen the crisis of world Stalinism, a crisis that has been developing in direct proportion to the progress of the world socialist revolution.To be sure, neither the Yugoslav nor the Chinese Communist parties ceased to be Stalinist. But they did contribute profoundly to the eventual negation of Stalinism. Trotskyists have never claimed a franchise on revolutionary theory and practice. On the contrary, all of our work is directed toward convincing the working class and its parties to take the revolutionary road. It is to be noted, however, that in order to take such a road, a Communist party is compelled to defy the Kremlin, the basic policy of Stalinism, and its own entire ideology and tradition. This is one important aspect of the contradictory nature of the process whereby Stalinism will be removed as a barrier to the socialist revolution. THE reaction of the Kremlin itself to the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions is the best proof of the basically anti-Stalinist character of these events. World Stalinism cannot embrace new revolutions and independent workers states. In Eastern Europe, where the capitalists were expropriated by bureaucratic and military means under the direction of the Kremlin while the independent workers revolution was brutally suppressed, the Kremlin can tolerate only regimes completely subservient to its command. As for Yugoslavia, Moscow was compelled to open a savage campaign against Titoism when the Yugoslav CP, having led a revolution to victory, refused to act like the pliant creatures of the Moscow-appointed regimes in Eastern Europe."
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"content": "The intolerable contradiction introduced within Stalinism by the victory of the Chinese revolution is likewise quite evident – only on a larger scale and with higher stakes. It occurs, moreover, in a world setting favorable to deepening the revolutionary factors that are upsetting the equilibrium of the Stalinist monolith. For the last few years Peking has increasingly manifested an open break with the Kremlin on at least three basic questions of Marxist theory:It has defended important aspect of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the struggle against imperialist war as against Moscow’s theory of peaceful coexistence;It has likewise invoked Lenin’s teachings on the revolutionary road to power in capitalist countries as against Moscow’s open abandonment of the revolutionary class-struggle theory;It has taken issue with Moscow’s directive to Communist parties to enter coalition governments with the bourgeoisie of the former colonial countries.These sharp differences with the Kremlin have developed despite the fact that the Mao regime is beset by bureaucratic deformations of its own and is saddled with the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country. These points in common are apparently insufficient to offset the obvious fear Peking has that the Kremlin will sacrifice the interests of the Chinese revolution in order to make a deal with Western imperialism. Such a fear is based on reality. The Chinese CP leaders knew they came to power despite the Kremlin’s readiness to sacrifice the Chinese Communist party in a deal with the US and Great Britain. Whatever their motives, the struggle the Chinese leaders are waging against Khrushchev’s policy is bound to have far-reaching effects in helping to bring about a revolutionary rearmament of the advanced workers in all countries.In Japan, where the mass action of workers and students last June against the imperialist pact was possible because the leaders of the movement had broken with the Stalinist line of “peaceful coexistence,” the debate being waged by the Chinese CP against Moscow can only encourage the young revolutionists and reinforce the arguments they have up to now learned only from the Trotskyists.In Cuba, the position of Peking can play a crucial role in preventing Stalinism from interposing its influence in order to halt the deepening of the socialist character of the revolution.In England and the United States, the Trotskyists have made significant gains in the last few years in struggle with both Stalinism and Social Democracy as a result of the shattering crisis of Stalinism following Khrushchev’s revelations. The opposition of Peking to Moscow’s Stalinist line will likewise help to encourage a revolutionary reorientation of Communist workers and youth. Such a reorientation can only lead them to a fusion with Trotskyism. PERHAPS the best test of the viability of each of the three tendencies in the working class movement has occurred right here in the United States. An examination of the reciprocal relations among the three, under the blows of the cold war witch hunt, the prolonged prosperity and political reaction, and the crisis of the American Communist party, discloses the fact that both Stalinism and Social Democracy have withered and suffered a sharp decline in influence. (See Case History of an Experiment, by Murry Weiss in the Spring 1960 issue of ISR.)The Trotskyist movement, on the other hand, has stood the acid test of this long period of adversity, gained in forces particularly among the youth, and is today the only one of the three tendencies with the capacity and will to offer a socialist challenge to the two capitalist parties in the 1960 elections. The Social Democrats and Stalinists have responded to the difficulties of these last years by a process of increasingly dissolving themselves into the labor bureaucracy and its fringes and into the swamp of the Democratic party. They have thereby alienated the best of the new generation of radicals that has begun to appear on the American scene. If the struggle between Trotskyism, Social Democracy and Stalinism is by its very logic a struggle for the next generation of radicals in the US, Trotskyism can enter the battle with confidence of victory.Top of pageWeiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageLast updated: 29.1.2006"
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"content": "Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurry WeissStalinism and the Twenty-Second Congress(Winter 1962)From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, pp.10-14.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). The body of Stalin lies buried in the Kremlin wall but the ghost of the dictator’s policies continues to haunt those who served him well while he livedTHE events surrounding the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party last October 1961 constitute a remarkable refutation of imperialist cold-war propaganda. The central prop of the cold-war argument is that socialism and tyranny are inseparable; and that the working masses in the capitalist world should never embark on a socialist revolution since the frightful consequences inevitably will be Stalinism. If the US State Department theory made sense, then the industrial, scientific and cultural growth of the Soviet Union would lead to the strengthening of Stalinism. In actuality, however, the impressive advances of socialism in the USSR, which capitalists don’t even try to deny, is resulting in de-Stalinization and tangible gains of democratization rather than the growth of bureaucratic tyranny.For all its democratic pretensions, imperialism favored Stalinism in the Soviet Union as against the robust and thriving socialist democracy. This is why the trend towards socialist democracy and internationalism within the Soviet orbit is bad news for capitalism and good news for the socialist movement.A Turkish diplomat, now residing in the US, wrote in a letter to the New York Times, Nov. 23, that Khrushchev “had no desire to alter Soviet policies.” Nevertheless, his“... peasant shrewdness ... led him to the best and only alternative. By denouncing Stalin’s crimes – and the more violent the better – he was disassociating himself and the Soviet Union from such policies and without undertaking any housecleaning, simply by indirection was creating an image of a more liberal and humane Khrushchev and Soviet Union ... This I sense to be the underlying theme of de-Stalinization, against which we must watch carefully, for in the long run it would deprive us of the one infallible weapon that we have against communism.” (emphasis, M.W.).This super-clever imperialist diplomat imagines he is matching wits with a super-clever Khrushchev. This reasoning is based on the premise that heads of state can arbitrarily manipulate their respective nations at home in accordance with the needs of diplomatic propaganda.The diplomat perceives a threat to world capitalism in the dethronement of the Stalin “cult” and the demolition of Stalinism. He correctly senses that a blockbusting power is aiming at the capitalist system. A resurgence of socialist democracy in the Soviet Union will indeed deprive capitalism of its “one infallible weapon” against communism. In the face of this Soviet transformation the whole cloth of the cold-war ideology will be cut to shreds. So, take note all imperialist policy makers, a guided missile of a new type is heading your way. What counter-weapon can you command in your arsenal? Radicals Ill-PreparedBut the radical movement also has by no means reacted to the 22nd Congress without apprehension. Since the 1956 Khrushchev revelations of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress, those in and around the American Communist Party as in all CPs throughout the world have been unable to find their bearings regarding the crucial question of Stalinism. Some radicals cherished the illusion that the nightmarish specter of Stalin and Stalinism would somehow blow over, go away and disappear.One of the reasons why the radical movement was ill-prepared to cope with Stalinism was the way Khrushchev presented the 1956 revelations. The facts about Stalin’s frame-ups and mass murders demanded a serious Marxist explanation of the social cause for the “cult of the individual.” But Khrushchev couldn’t or wouldn’t provide an explanation. Instead he wound up the revelations as follows:“We consider that Stalin was excessively extolled. However, in the past Stalin doubtlessly performed great services to the party, to the working class and to the international workers’ movement ... We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot.” THIS soothing syrup became bitter medicine. The 22nd Congress revealed that Khrushchev could never salvage the cracked image of Stalin. It had to be completely shattered. Stalin had to be exhumed from the Lenin Tomb at Red Square. More and more revelations were required. Instead of Stalin alone bearing the blame for the crimes, mounting to a veritable chamber of horrors, it became imperatively necessary to provide the names of some of those who shared Stalin’s criminal deeds. Khrushchev pointed an accusing finger at the “anti-party” group of Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and Voroshilov as those, and presumably those alone, who were guilty of assisting Stalin’s blood purges. But since Khrushchev is naming some, what of the others?Dorothy Healy, executive secretary of the Communist Party in Southern California, stated to a witch-hunting committee, according to the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 7, 1961, that she was “more devastated by Khrushchev’s [1956] revelations of past crimes by the Soviet regime than you.” She said further that she “would like to see the Soviet Union progress democratically to the point where there would be more than one party on the ballot there.”Without the slightest aid or comfort to the capitalist propaganda, Healy has raised a key subject of the need for socialist democracy. We for our part would certainly favor the right of socialists to create an independent working class party in the Soviet Union because at present the existing CP in the USSR is completely monopolized by the Soviet bureaucracy."
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"content": "But the prospect of the right to organize an independent party rivaling the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union is posed concretely at this time over the deep debate between the Khrushchev faction in power and the alleged “anti-party” group of Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and Voroshilov. Why does Khrushchev refuse to grand Molotov’s constitutional right to present his views at the 22nd Congress? Why this torrent of denunciations of the “anti-party” group while it is muzzled? The reason is quite apparent. If Molotov were allowed to talk at the party congress this might disclose that everything Khrushchev said about the “anti-party” group as accomplices of Stalin would be just as true about Khrushchev! And once each faction in the bureaucratic regime had listed its record of denunciation and a counter-record of equally damning denunciations the result would be – the disclosure not of one pack of scoundrels or another pack but a sociological phenomenon: a bureaucracy; not bureaucratic errors or bureaucratic crimes but a social and historical development of a parasitic bureaucratic caste. The working masses are exerting enormous pressure on the whole regime to yield concessions of socialist democratic rights. The bureaucracy in power, headed by Khrushchev, are maneuvering for time to find the line of demarcation between imperatively necessary concessions and repressions in a desperate attempt to save the entire rule of the bureaucracy. JUST consider the statements of the Khrushchev group at the congress in the light of the record:At the congress Khrushchev warned the members of the “anti-party” group to beware “lest their role as accessories to the mass reprisals [instigated by Stalin] come to light.” He added, “We are in duty bound to do everything to establish the truth.” Everything?As the chief of the Ukraine in Stalin’s time Khrushchev declaimed in 1936, “Stalin is the hope, the beacon which leads all progressive humanity! Stalin is our banner! Stalin is our will! Stalin is our victory!”During the peak years of Stalin’s blood purge, Khrushchev said, “The Ukrainian people cry out: Long live our beloved Stalin!”When the Stalin gang murdered the Red Army’s Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky, Khrushchev described this executed victim as “a traitor that the party had unmasked and liquidated, throwing him like dust to the winds so that no trace should be left.” But now at the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev refers to Tukhachevsky as “a distinguished military leader.”When the Ukrainian General I.E. Hakir was executed, Khrushchev referred to him as “that scoundrel who opened the gates to the German fascists, feudalists and capitalists.” Now at the congress Khrushchev describes his victim as “a trusted party man.”One of Khrushchev’s colleagues at the 22nd Congress, N.D. Podgorny, said, “Kaganovich [in the Ukraine] surrounded himself with a pack of unprincipled bootlickers, beating up the cadres of faithful to the party and hounding and terrorizing the leading workers of the region.” But Khrushchev was Chairman of the Ukrainian CP during this whole period!Doesn’t this pose point blank the role of Khrushchev as an accessory of Stalin?If the 20th Congress raised the question of the bureaucracy as the social source of the “Stalin cult,” the 22nd Congress posed the question even more sharply.Keeping in focus the problem of the nature of Soviet bureaucracy, let us discuss some of the recent reactions in Communist Party and radical circles shortly before the 22nd Congress and following it. Mandel RequestsIn the People’s World October 14, 1961, “Two diverse views of Soviet discussion” were presented by William Mandel, a writer about the Soviet Union, and John Pittman, the PW’s correspondent in Moscow. Mandel said,“Many letters” in the Soviet press, “support the program’s [Khrushchev’s draft] undertaking to fight bureaucracy. Various amendments are offered to the proposed party rules in that respect but only one writer [in Trud] asks that the program include an explanation of why bureaucracy still exists, in view of the disappearance of the reasons for its existence stated in the program of 40 years ago.”Referring to the letter writer in the trade union paper, Trud, “who wants an explanation of bureaucracy,” Mandel concludes,“There is great approval of the condemnation of the ‘cult of the individual,’ but no hint that failure to permit discussion of policy (as illustrated above) instead of techniques may reflect a ‘cult of individual’.”Pittman takes Mandel to task for adding “a new dimension to presumptuousness” in complaining that there is a “failure to permit discussion of policy instead of technique” in the current discussion in the USSR on the draft program. Pittman is inconsistent. In the first place he argues that there is a policy discussion in the Soviet press and cites some examples which unfortunately do not show such a discussion. In the second place he argues that since there are thousands of daily and factory papers in the Soviet Union how could Mandel assert that there is no discussion. But in the third place he argues that such a discussion is not necessarily required. Here is what Pittman said:“It is not enough that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people are undertaking to create a society of abundance for all, to establish the world’s highest living standards, to safeguard humanity from thermonuclear extinction, to assist colonial peoples to achieve liberation and to help newly liberated peoples develop their countries, and to pioneer man’s conquest of the cosmos. In addition to these undertakings, in order to win Mandel’s approval they must discuss and agree with his ideas about Dr. Zhivago, final ballots with more than one name, why a magazine in Yiddish appeared in 1961 instead of 1954, and whether the theoretical resolution by Lenin and Stalin on the issue of ‘cultural-national versus regional autonomy’ half a century ago was really a mistake! Of course, neither Mandel nor I can be sure that these subjects have not been discussed. But I would be surprised if they were ... I doubt very much if people here would consider them pertinent to the building of a communist society.” "
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"content": "THIS is simply not the way to conduct a discussion. It is begging the question to dismiss the need for an explanation of bureaucracy by referring to “grand” questions. This is getting up on a high hobby horse and looking down at a trouble maker who wants to quibble about trivial questions. But these are not trivial questions, neither the Jewish problem, the national problem, freedom for writers and scientists, the multiple choice of candidates on the ballot – or the problem of bureaucracy. Mandel, moreover, doesn’t demand that the CP of the Soviet Union and the people must agree with him to gain his approval. He only raised the question of an explanation of bureaucracy and the source of the “cult of the individual” and regretted the absence of answers and discussion on this point.Trotsky’s PrognosisAll indications agree that the further course of [Soviet] development must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy. There is no peaceful outcome for this crisis. No devil ever yet voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its positions without a fight. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution.It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings – palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways – will be crowded out in favor of workers’ dwellings. “Bourgeois norms of distribution” [that is, inequality of income] will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of decorations will go info the melting pot. The youth will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains. And finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism. – Revolution Betrayed, by Leon Trotsky. Deutscher’s PrognosisThe dynamics of economic and cultural growth determine the prospects of domestic policy. The Soviet Union is an expanding society, emerging from a period of “primitive socialist accumulation,” rapidly increasing its wealth, and enabling all classes and groups to enlarge their shares of the national income. This makes for a relaxation of social tensions and antagonisms. On the other hand, the social and cultural advance tends to make the masses aware of the fact that they are deprived of political liberties and are ruled by an uncontrolled bureaucracy. In coming years this will impel them to seek freedom of expression and association, even if this should bring them into conflict with the ruling bureaucracy. No one can forsee with certainty whether the conflict will take violent and explosive forms and lead to the new “political revolution” which Trotsky once advocated, or whether the conflict will be resolved peacefully through bargaining, compromise, and the gradual enlargement of freedom. Much will depend on the behavior of those in power, on their sensitivity and readiness to yield in time to popular pressures. Towards the end of the Stalin era the antagonisms and tensions within Soviet society were acute; and if the ruling group had rigidly clung to the Stalinist method of government, it might have provoked a political explosion. This did not happen, however; and in consequence of the reforms carried out since 1953 the social and political tensions have been greatly reduced. Should the ruling group attempt to cancel these reforms, then it would certainly heighten the tensions once again and exacerbate the antagonisms But if the government remains flexible and sensitive to popular demands, there will be little likelihood of any explosive internal development. The prospect would then be one of further gradual reform, of increasing well-being and social contentment, and of growing freedom. – The Great Contest, by Isaac Deutscher. The PolesThe Communist Party leader, Wladislaw Gomulka, gave his report on the 22nd Congress to the Polish CP’s Central Committee last December 1961. “Broader explanations on the part of our Soviet comrades may be required,” he said, and offered his own line of explanation of Stalinism as “one dark page among the glorious pages of the Soviet Union’s history.” Asking how the “cult of personality” had come about he referred to “The extremely narrow economic base left over by Czarist Russia” and how it “affected the struggle of Russian revolutionists in a multinational country ... No other socialist country had comparable difficulties.”“Under such conditions,” Gomulka continued, “the Soviet state of the dictatorship of the proletariat had to be merciless ... It could not tolerate opposition groups, which under pressure of existing difficulties sought ways of solving them through wrong means.”In his further explanation as to why groups had to be suppressed, Gomulka said,“Because collectivization inevitably provoked resistance, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat had to strike back. But it should not have done this blindly. Organs appointed to combat the enemies [of collectivization] supervised and inspired by Stalin, exceeded the measure. As a result of Stalin’s theory of the inevitable aggravation of class warfare parallel to the building of socialism and of his slogan about ‘enemies of the people’ the NKVD [secret political police] could brand as enemies ... anyone who dared to utter a word of criticism.”Referring to 1937 in the Soviet Union, Gomulka said,"
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"content": "“When heads of marshals, generals, and high-ranking personalities of party and state were falling, people were caught by fear, became suspicious, and the mania of spying spread ... Even taking into account all the negative features of his character [Stalin], it cannot be imagined that he would have embarked upon the bloody purge of the high command and the officers corps without the deliberate misinformations planted by the Gestapo.”Gomulka also offered an explanation for the notorious “confessions” at the Moscow trials in the thirties, when old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kameney, Radek, Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky (all members of the Bolshevik Central Committee of the 1917 October Revolution) fell victim to Stalin’s executions. These Bolshevik leaders, in Gomulka’s phrase, suffered “their silent endurance of Stalin’s violence.” Gomulka said, this was “not merely caused by fear,” although “of course, one’s head is dear to everyone.” But, he maintained,“Communists are courageous people, men of ideals ... Stalin directed the building of socialism in the Soviet Union. A Communist therefore had to face this question: Will he not act to the disadvantage of communism, if he acts against Stalin? This question disarmed Communists and kept them from struggling with Stalin.” IT IS significant that Gomulka has opened a line of explanation on the cause of Stalin’s Moscow Trial frame-ups and the mass murders. To refrain from any explanation is, of course, the first line of defense of the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union and the respective bureaucratic formations in the other workers states in Eastern Europe and Asia. One of the reasons why the CP of Poland is among the first to venture into this explosive realm – the social basis for bureaucratic crimes – arises from the events of the last five years.In Poland the mass of industrial workers had vast experience in a direct collision with the bureaucratic regime in 1956. The June 1956 general-strike uprising in Poznan ignited a wave of mass demonstrations of workers and youth throughout Poland to overthrow the Kremlin-controlled Warsaw bureaucratic tops.In October 1956 the Warsaw factory proletariat mobilized around a dissident CP wing of the leadership, Gomulka, who was framed by Stalinism in 1949 as a “Titoist fascist” and locked up in prison for four years, and this wing triumphed against the Kremlin-controlled faction. Over the weekend of Oct. 20-21 the traditionally socialist Warsaw working class, alerted at the work benches, dispatched delegation after delegation to the Political Committee to support Gomulka as against the Khrushchev appointed Polish functionaries. The Kremlin’s Red Army was poised for an attack. But it was the revolutionary mass organization of the working class, deeply anti-Stalinist, that won the day and hurled back the Kremlin’s direct control.But the Polish CP bureaucratic caste was not shattered, it was reconstituted with a shift in relation of forces between the bureaucracy and the greater voice of the proletariat. Under these conditions, however, in comparison to the Soviet Union itself where the Soviet proletariat has not directly attacked the bureaucracy as yet, Gomulka is compelled to deal with an explanation of Stalinism which has been openly talked about among workers and youth for five years. Gomulka, however, as the new representative of the bureaucracy, continues to refrain from dealing with the nature of bureaucracy as such. He draws a thread of connection between broad objective, historical, economic and social forces – with the personality of Stalin. The missing link is a bureaucratic social formation transmitting objective pressure, pressures that are only personified in a Stalin or a Khrushchev. This is the sensitive, sore point – a bureaucratic caste – and the bureaucracy itself cannot bear to identify the malignant malady or how socialist democracy will conquer it. A Pat, Tidy ApologyAn interpretation of the 22nd Congress was presented in the National Guardian, November 13, 1961 by David Wesley, who offered an explanation of Stalinism as follows:“China, Vietnam and Korea, like the USSR, have had to industrialize and collectivize virtually from scratch, and are now in a stage roughly comparable to that of the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1934, when Stalin carried through the basic Soviet economic development with ruthless authoritarian control. The Far East states feel the need for similar methods, and it is the Stalin of that period (and of wartime) that they remember and respect. Moreover, they will require those harsh methods for some time to come; for these members of the camp – and for Albania – Khrushchev’s call for an end to dictatorship seems decidedly premature.”If Wesley thinks he is arriving at a pat, tidy apology for Stalinism, he had better think again. Stalinism was required, you see, for one period in the Soviet Union; is required for a “roughly comparable” period for China, Vietnam, Korea and Albania thrown in for good measure; and Khrushchev’s mistake is a premature call for an end to Stalinist dictatorship for the Far East. QED!Let’s consider only a few of the contradictions arrived at by this sophistry. If this is a search for the sequence of objective economic causes giving rise to the Stalinist political form, why does Wesley designate the years 1928 to 1934 as the economically motivated “ruthlessness” of Stalin and does not allude to years before and after 1928-34 in which Stalinism prevailed?In the years from 1924 to 1928 Stalin began the destruction of workers democracy in the name of unyielding opposition to industrialization, planned economy and collectivization. Trotsky’s proposal for a five-year plan was derided by Stalin as “super-industrial”; when Trotsky proposed collectivization and warned of the capitalist danger of wealthy peasants, Stalin leaned on the Kulak and the petty-capitalist forces and refused to carry out the Left Opposition’s policy.During 1928-34, Stalin deepened the process of extirpating workers democracy, the strangulation of the Soviets, the trade unions and the Bolshevik party itself – this time in the name of planned economy, industrialization and collectivization in recoil from the previous period which brought a capitalist restoration to within an inch of realization."
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"content": "In the period following 1934, when Stalin, according to Wesley had already “carried through the basic Soviet economic development,” the utter elimination of workers democracy was consumated in earnest under the sign of frame-ups, witch hunts, and mass murders including the repeated execution of Stalin’s own henchmen, layer after layer. WESLEY’S schema is to box in the “authoritarian” period of Stalin to these six years since that was the period the Stalin faction finally came out for industrialization after demolishing the Trotskyist Left Opposition for proposing this course. In this way, Wesley can justify a historical cause-effect relation between the need for industrialization and the Stalinist destruction of workers democracy.Moreover, this schema implies a necessary and required relationship between carrying through socialist production and the need for a ruthless despot.But why not stop to ask: what did the Russian workers, who carried through three revolutions against landlordism, Czarism, capitalism and imperialism, through the historical agency of workers democracy, think about the need for a Stalinst dictatorship and the elimination of socialist democracy? And ask: did the Soviet workers submissively accept Stalinism without a struggle? Were they simply a mass of unthinking sheep just waiting for Stalin to cripple their revolutionary creative capacities in order to allow the all-wise bureaucrats to carry out objective historical tasks of industrialization? If Wesley really ponders this question he might find that he has arrived at the very thesis on which both Stalinism and imperialism agree: that socialist construction in the Soviet Union was synonymous with Stalin and Stalinism, for better or for worse.This is why it is neccessary to go beyond the reference to Stalin alone and perceive the existence of a social formation known as “bureaucracy” and its polar opposite, workers democracy.The ever widening and more open debate within the Soviet orbit and the world Communist parties is accompanied by the sharper “debate” Khrushchev is waging against the silenced opponents in the “anti-party” group. But it is becoming clear that these debates are not restrained from fear that the imperialists will discover the “secret” of their differences. The bureaucratic hierarchies fear more than anything else that the working class and youth will enter the open arena, take sides, arrive at judgements, enunciate demands, define goals and drive to achive the restoration of workers democracy. LEONID F. Ilyichev, a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, indicated the tightrope which the Russian bureaucracy is walking on in its “de-Stalinization” campaign.At a recent national conference on ideological problems the secretary warned,“We must not allow, comrades, a blow to be dealt to the foundation of Marxist-Leninist theory under the pretext of combating the personality cult in this theory. We must not allow all kinds of anti-Leninist views and trends, long ago defeated and discarded by our party and by Lenin, to come to the surface and leak into our press.”Does this refer to Trotsky, who while Stalin was alive, became the authoritative spokesman for workers democracy against the entire bureaucratic caste? Does Ilyichev’s warning disclose that the demand to examine the views of Trotsky is reappearing in the Soviet Union?Audacious fresh approaches to basic problems are appearing in all countries of the Soviet orbit, and within the Communist parties throughout the world. The Italian Communist Party, for example, has plunged into the stream of this discussion. The party newspaper, l’Unita, November 28, 1961, hailed the 22nd Congress’ denunciation of “errors and aberrations of the past.” But even more to the point, the article said:“The question cannot exhaust itself in a simple denunciation of Stalin’s negative qualities and his errors. How was it possible that in the construction of a socialist society there were so many errors and deformation and what can be done to guarantee that they will not be repeated?”This is indeed a good question.One of the leading representatives of the Italian CP, Amandola, a proponent of one of the tendencies in the Central Committee, according to France Observateur, said,“It is a matter of returning to Leninism by returning political discussion to the international level. This naturally implies that debate on the problems raised take place in realistic terms and not in ritualistic language. This equally requires a critical study of the political documents presented by the communist parties of other countries.”In keeping with this bold Leninist spirit, it is appropriate that the Young Communist League of Italy should take the lead in defying the Stalinist practice borrowed from the Roman Catholic Index Expurgatorius and publish in its paper a photograph of Trotsky beside Lenin. The Italian YCL official paper, Nuova Generazione, refers to Trotsky as “one of the most original personalities of the October Revolution, about whose ideas discussion is now reopened. Among other works, he is the author of one of the most interesting histories of the Revolution and some of the finest pages on Lenin.” The YCL proceeds to discuss critically and thoughtfully the views of Trotsky.Top of pageWeiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageLast updated: 28.1.2006"
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"content": "Murry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurray Weiss“A Symbol of Our Way of Life”(2 July 1948)From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 28, 12 July 1948, p. 4.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).Nominating speech by Murray Weiss of Farrell Dobbs at the 13th National Convention of the SWPComrades, we nominate differently, we nominate different people, different kinds of people, we are, as Comrade Trotsky put it, a different kind of a party. There has never been a party like ours in history before. We are the Bolshevik type of party, a party founded on principles and on people Who take their principles so seriously that their whole lives become action and thought to carry through these principles consistently to the very end.In nominating Farrell Dobbs, and contrary to the mockery of nomination speeches and traditions of bourgeois parties, we don’t leave the name until the end, although everybody knows it in the beginning. In nominating Farrell Dobbs, I think it is more than a phrase to say that we are nominating a symbol, an individual who is a symbol of our ideas, our methods, and our way of life. Not an individual who suits his principles and his declarations on political questions to the needs of a political career, but an individual symbolizing the whole current thought in history of our movement, whose whole life has been devoted to carrying out the central ideas of emancipating revolutionary socialism.Comrade Farrell’s name is associated with two crucial episodes in the history of American Trotskyism. The first episode that I refer to is the test of the ideas and the powers of American Trotskyism in the field of the American working class mass movement – the Minneapolis Strikes, where we demonstrated to the hilt we were not sectarian phrase-mongers, that our principles were not text book ideas, but living doctrines and guides to revolutionary action, and could be applied to the given stage of the American working class movement with the greatest skill, with revolutionary innovation, with boldness, sincerity, and determination. We showed a model of leadership in the class struggle that has already made history in the class struggle.The second episode, and just as important, complementary to the first, was shown when Comrade Farrell along with the 17 other leaders of our Party stood up under the test of class fire, the fire of the ruling class, headed by Roosevelt and all the other war-mongers, the united political opposition of the bourgeoisie and their trade-union lackeys, who directed the fire properly against our party and its leaders at the beginning of the 2nd World War. We showed them, Comrade Dobbs among the others showed then, that not only could we unfold our ideas in the class struggle, win positions of influence and prestige in the mass movement, but we could take all this influence and prestige and officialdom and power that went with it and throw it into the waste basket when it came to a test of principle, integrity, revolutionary doctrine in the face of the bourgeois war, of the imperialist world slaughter.I think in these two episodes alone, one needs go no further, we have in Comrade Dobbs, and I think in the next nominee as well, a worthy representative of the cause of American Trotskyism, and cause of the Socialist Workers Party. And I formally nominate Comrade Farrell Dobbs as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party. Top of pageMurry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageLast updated: 2 November 2022"
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"content": "Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurry WeissMcCarthyism: Key Issue in the 1954 ElectionsAfter the Army-McCarthy Hearings(July 1954)From Fourth International, Vol.15 No.3, Summer 1954, p.76-80.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).SENATOR McCarthy took the 36 days of the Army-McCarthy TV hearings as a priceless opportunity to shape a political image before millions of viewers – the image of himself as savior of America. He played up to the mass audience, pandering to .their, prejudices, shocking, arousing, repelling them – and at the same time fascinating them with his brazenness, his arrogant assurance, his utter contempt for his opponents. Above all, he pounded tirelessly on his fascist charge of “20” and “21 years of treason.”The hearings over, the Wisconsin fascist leader retired to a secret hide-out to recuperate and plot his next move. The sudden relief the liberals felt from the daily fascist rasp on their nerves induced reckless speculation: they told each other that McCarthy was finished, and they held funeral services for him in their newspaper columns. He had turned out to be his own worst enemy, the liberals assured themselves. The American people, they declared, had got a good look at McCarthy and his methods and had decided they, didn’t want any part of either.But life is unkind to illusions. McCarthy returned, and it became clear that the fascist beast was still alive and kicking, and that the nightmare wasn’t over by any means.The next act of this political drama is now to be played against the backdrop of the 1954 elections. What will McCarthy’s role be? Will he split from the Republican party after the primaries and form a separate fascist party? Or will a new modus vivendi, based on common determination to win a witch-hunting victory over the Democrats, be established between McCarthy and the other Republicans?To assess the role of McCarthyism in the coming elections, it is first necessary to make a realistic estimate of the results of the Army-McCarthy hearings.It is possible to draw a pleasing sketch of McCarthyism in decline since the beginning of the year. A superficial comparison of McCarthy’s power before and after the hearings has led commentators to the hasty conclusion that McCarthyism is routed. Not only the highly impressionable liberal columnists but some of the more sober observers, including those in the official trade union camp, have drawn this conclusion. Labor’s Daily, July 13, announces in a headline, “Joe’s Strength Ebbing Fast,” and opens its story:“Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was under attack from all sides today and it appeared his strength was ebbing even in his home state.”There is some truth to the contention that McCarthy has suffered a setback. But only a grain of truth. And this grain cannot be properly understood unless it is put in context. For while suffering blows and tactical setbacks, McCarthyism has in the same period made important advances in its basic development as a fascist movement.The year 1954 opened auspiciously for McCarthy. Early in February, he went on national tour under the official sponsorship of the Republican National Committee, and proceeded to denounce the Democrats for their “20 years of treason.”Within the Senate, McCarthy seemed unassailable. On Feb. 2 the Democrats and Republicans collapsed and voted 85 to 1 for the appropriations he demanded for his committee. McCarthy’s Senate power was further strengthened by his appointment to the all-important Rules Committee.McCarthy’s prowess as a witch hunter was at a high point. In his first public skirmish with the Army, over the Peress and General Zwicker affair, McCarthy scored a hands-down victory, the Army beating a fumbling and apologetic retreat before him. The extent of his power in relation to the Army Department was revealed in the fantastic picture that came out later, in the Army-McCarthy hearings, of Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens chasing up and down the country trying to curry favor with Pvt. G. David Schine, a McCarthy protegé.And McCarthy’s success in building a spy network in government agencies was evidenced in the appointment of his personal henchman, Robert E. Lee, to the Federal Communications Commission, and the placing of his lieutenant, Scott McLeod, in charge of State Department security. A Pleasing Score CardIf we now list the tactical blows and reverses McCarthy has suffered during the last few months, without examining the situation further, it is quite possible to draw the altogether erroneous conclusion that McCarthy’s power is being smashed.Since the hearings, McCarthy’s faction has been on the defensive. A majority bloc of the three Democrats on McCarthy’s committee, plus Republican Sen. Potter, has forced McCarthy to accept the resignation of his personal favorite, Roy M. Cohn, chief counsel of the committee. Sen. Flanders’ resolution to remove McCarthy from his committee chairmanships is still pending. McCarthy’s attempt to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency has been temporarily blocked. And President Eisenhower himself has finally spoken out against McCarthy, censuring him for his “reprehensible” methods.Even the press seems to have swung against McCarthy. The mass-circulation pro-McCarthy press has adopted a more cautious attitude, and the mildly critical tone of such papers as the New York Times and Herald Tribune has given way to a crusading anti-McCarthy editorial policy.In the electoral field there are indications of a shift against McCarthy. The outspoken anti-Semite and McCarthyite, Jack Tenney, was badly defeated for State Senator in the California primaries. And in the Maine primaries, Robert L. Jones, McCarthyite opponent of incumbent Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, was swamped by a 5 to 1 margin.Finally, it can be said that McCarthy’s prestige as a witch hunter has suffered. The fact that he was forced to defend himself at the hearings, and to demand nights he never gave others, damaged his awesome appearance as the grand inquisitor who stood above all questioning.And yet, despite this superficially comforting picture of McCarthy’s fortunes in decline, it would be disastrous to fail to see that actually American fascism experienced a profound development precisely during the last months. Deepening of the Process"
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"content": "The point we must grasp is that while the incipient fascist movement has experienced tactical setbacks, these setbacks are related to the deepening of the process of formation of a distinct fascist faction in the administration and in the Republican Party. They are also related to the mobilization of a fascist mass following. Without such blows a fascist movement does not develop. The blows from the old-line capitalist political machines represent their resistance to the emergence of a powerful fascist threat to their own form of capitalist rule. Historically, the fascist movement has always used such attacks to enhance its appearance as the party of the “underdog,” the “little people” who hate the powers that be.If we listen to pollsters who have sampled public opinion since the hearings and who prove that McCarthy has no more than 25 or 30% of the populace in his camp, we might conclude that McCarthyism is no longer a threat. But the conclusion is false – for the simple reason that fascism is not running for election in America. Is it necessary to recall that the Nazis suffered a serious election defeat immediately before Hitler took power?When we look: at McCarthyism as a fascist movement in the process of formation, the figure of “only” 25 percent looms as the most ominous political fact of 1954.If we regard the events of the first six months of 1954 as a test of whether McCarthyism was just another strain of the reactionary breed of capitalist politics, or something qualitatively different, then the fact that the McCarthy faction has withstood all attempts to integrate it into the Republican machine is a strong indication that McCarthyism is no ordinary current. The growing differentiation of a fascist faction within the capitalist parties is a sign of the maturity of the threat to the working class.One of the gravest signs of the extent of the fascist danger is the hardening of the core of McCarthy’s following through the “ordeal” of the hearings. The fascist movement is crystallizing, not only among government functionaries and national politicians, but at the grass roots. The selection of a fascist cadre with a broad following is taking place: The process is by no means complete, and before it is complete the working class will have its opportunity to reverse it; but it is already developing in outline form. We leave it to people who believe in miracles and the Democratic party to ignore such a phenomenon.We must look at the social base of McCarthy’s mass support. Who are the hard-core McCarthy supporters that make up 25 percent of the population? Unfortunately the pollsters do not take their point of departure from the reciprocal relations between the three social classes in American society – capitalist, middle class and working class. Nevertheless, they do indicate in their findings that the main support for McCarthy comes from sections of the lower middle class and among unorganized workers. Insofar as social composition is treated in the polls, there is a high percentage of the uneducated, the small farmers, small businessmen and declassed elements in the pro-McCarthy columns.Will this mass following go all the way with the fascist movement? That depends. It depends above all on what the workers’ organizations do. During the hearings the labor officials stood aside and watched the Democrats carry the ball. All they did was to cheer a little from the sidelines. As a result McCarthy gained where it hurt labor most – in the consolidation of a mass following. History will not permit many blunders like this without visiting severe punishment on the working class. A New TestThe army-McCarthy hearings, which disclosed the whole anatomy of a conspiracy to shackle the United States with a fascist dictatorship, should have been the signal for a mighty offensive of the labor movement against this ominous threat. The moment was missed. And now a new test is before us – the 1954 elections.The elections will not pass without McCarthy utilizing them in the same way he utilized the hearings – to build a mass following, to cultivate the legend of invincibility, and to grab every bit of radio and TV time possible for his fascist propaganda. He is planning to open his first big skirmish with the labor movement precisely during the election campaigns. What else does his plan to investigate “subversion” in defense plants signify?But the labor bureaucracy persists in its strategy of leaving the defeat of McCarthy to the Democratic party. They preach that with the election of a Democratic majority in Congress in 1954, and a Democratic president and administration in 1956, all the basic problems of the working class, including the problem of McCarthyism, will be solved.The Democratic stategists, in their turn, also promise that McCarthy will be taken care of if a Democratic majority is elected to the Senate. They argue that if they are the majority McCarthy would be removed as chairman of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee without even a struggle – since under the ordinary rules of Senate procedure McCarthy would then be replaced by the senior Democrat on the committee.Can anything more asinine be imagined? The whole problem of defeating American fascism is reduced to the electing of Democrats instead of Republicans – to a maneuver in Congress – to a re-shuffling of posts! And all this, after the experiences of Italy and Germany and Spain!Perhaps salvation lies not with the Democrats but with the Eisenhower Republicans? After all, they have been doing the main fighting, even though they are somewhat inept and at times downright idiotic.The extent to which the Eisenhower Republicans can be depended on to handle McCarthy can be measured by the fact that McCarthy has no reason to split from the Republican party at this time. McCarthy aims at 1956 and the presidency. The organization of a separate fascist party can wait until the experiment of capturing the Republican party has played itself out. In the meantime, the GOP is a perfect arena for McCarthy at this stage of development of his fascist movement."
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"content": "The fact that McCarthy doesn’t have the support at this time of the main sections of the Big Business rulers of the Republican party is not decisive in his calculations. His is a long-term perspective. The crisis of world capitalism is having an explosive effect on the stability and inner equilibrium of the American capitalist political structure. McCarthy obviously senses this. He is ready for sharp turns, sudden upsets, and for any number of cleavages and weaknesses to develop in the most solid and conservative section of the bourgeoisie.Those who think that the biggest and most powerful sections of American finance capital will never throw in their lot with McCarthy do not know these capitalists, their moods or their problems. It is not only the new and fabulously rich oil tycoons who are fascist-minded. The key sectors of America’s rulers would turn to fascism in a moment if they thought that it could solve their problems. That’s what McCarthy must prove to them, and that’s all he must prove. Aim to Win the ElectionsThe Republican aim is to win the elections. That’s the Democratic aim also. This is not meant to be facetious. American capitalist politics is unprincipled to the core, dominated as it is by an overriding concern for the enormous advantage that control of the administration gives to the capitalist group in power. In order to win, each side will resort to any lie, trick or device that can bring victory.Last November Brownell showed how the Republican strategists operate. He accused Truman of harboring and promoting a Russian agent. The whole charge was calculated to swing the tide against the Democrats in the California Congressional race then pending. The string of Democratic victories in the nationwide off-year elections had unnerved the Republican high command, and they resorted to this smear to discredit the Democratic party and stop the Democratic election trend.What was the result? In answering Brownell, Truman characterized Brownell’s method as “McCarthyism.” Whereupon McCarthy demanded and got equal time with Truman to answer him. Having seized the initiative, McCarthy took over the debate and beat the Republican party and even Eisenhower himself over the head with the same club he used on Truman. From then on it was McCarthy’s show.But this experience didn’t inhibit the Republican high command from playing ball with McCarthy. They sent him out as their chief spokesman in opening the 1954 election campaign. Feeds on Witch HuntMcCarthy took advantage of this opening so aggressively and skillfully that the Republican administration had to make a stand against him. The line between the permissible and the impermissible had to be drawn – and the administration made its stand through the Army-McCarthy hearings. But it is precisely these hearings which revealed that their strategy is not to destroy McCarthy but merely to establish a modus vivendi in which the fascist demagogue would voluntarily restrict himself within certain limits. These limits are exactly what McCarthy must overstep in order to build his fascist movement. He overstepped them before, in taking advantage of the openings his Democratic and Republican opponents gave him. Such openings arise from, the official witch hunt and its inevitable consequence – inter-party and inner-party witch hunting. Is there any reason to believe that McCarthy’s opponents will now at long last refrain from creating new openings for him? It can be confidently predicted that the temptation to witch hunt opposing candidates in the prevailing fetid atmosphere will not be heroically resisted by the power-hungry contenders.While McCarthy makes the “treason” charge the kernel of his fascist program to “save America” and to establish his own dictatorship, the old-line machine men of the Republican party can see a lot of merit in that charge as a formula for winning elections – if the necessary hysteria can be worked up to swing it into high gear. And isn’t the Republican administration, with Eisenhower and Brownell in the lead, working day and night to build the hysteria and create precisely such a national lynch atmosphere?The moment another episode like Brownell’s smear of Truman last November takes place, McCarthy will at one stroke wipe out any tactical losses he suffered in his fight with the Army and the administration. He will be completely vindicated. All grounds for anti-McCarthy maneuvers within the party and administration will be removed. McCarthy will then be able to make a new and powerful push in building his fascist network in all government and military agencies, as well as in mobilizing a mass following.The present relationship of forces between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is very close in both the Senate and the House. The Democrats are obviously depending on the usual mid-term swing against the “ins” during periods of economic decline. The Republicans also are worried that the recession – which looks very much like a depression to the workers – will provoke a swing to the Democratic party in 1954 that could roll on to 1956. At the same time, the farm vote hangs in the balance, and there is already evidence that a section of Eisenhower farm support has turned against him. Under all these circumstances, with the fate of their whole administration at stake, it can hardly be expected that the Republicans will not use the witch hunt technique.There is no getting away from it. The witch hunt has a logic of its own, independent of the intentions of its authors and users. It was inevitable that the witch hunt, started by the Democrats under Truman, would develop until the capitalist politicians began to devour one another. And in this process, a fascist movement can maneuver with ease, gaining the initiative at every critical turn. A New Force in PoliticsThis election year of 1954 is not merely another year in the see-saw between the two capitalist parties. Something new has been added. For the first time in American history a powerful fascist movement is on the political scene. And the defeat of this fascist movement is now the main order of business before the working class of this country."
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"content": "When the Socialist Workers Party says that the drive of a fascist movement toward power must be met by a counter-drive of the workers toward power, the labor officials and liberals smile indulgently and return to the “practical” questions of the day. But there were a lot smarter labor officials and liberals in Italy, Germany and Spain, who rejected the reality of the struggle with fascism – and woke up in concentration camps or in exile.Other elements in and around the ideological fringe of the labor bureaucracy talk airily about “fighting fascism,” but are too sophisticated and too lacking in revolutionary faith in the capacity of the American proletariat, to talk of such “cliches” as a “struggle for workers’ power.”The worst of these elements within the labor bureaucracy for trying to crash the bureaucracy) is the Stalinists. The Stalinists not only refuse to talk of an orientation toward workers’ power; it is their prime objective to prove that they have nothing to do with such “irresponsible” perspectives. For them, all strategy in fighting McCarthyism is reduced to the slogan: Get into the Democratic party.And yet any sober reflection on the real situation in the United States and the experience of Europe shows that we face precisely that alternative: workers’ power or fascist power.It may be objected: Are you serious? To whom, are you addressing this program of struggle for workers’ power as the only means to smash the fascist menace? To the American labor movement, with its corrupt, capitalist-minded labor bureaucracy? Isn’t this somewhat ludicrous?The need for a revolutionary socialist strategy to successfully fight McCarthyism is not a laughing matter. What is ludicrous is not the distance between our socialist program and the program of the labor bureaucracy, but rather the disproportion between the program of the labor bureaucracy and the objective reality. That is both ludicrous and tragic. The Reality in AmericaOur program conforms to reality. It is based on both theoretical analysis and historical experience. But the program of the American labor bureaucracy is based on memories of the past, on a relation of class forces that is about to be blown up by the deepening of the world capitalist crisis within the American sector. That’s why it is a worthless program.The reformist program of the bureaucracy and the Stalinists had some semblance of “realism” in the epoch of the rise of capitalism, or in countries like the US where the crisis of capitalism was delayed by way of imperialist expansion – that is, by way of thrusting the rest of the capitalist world into a deeper crisis.As long as capitalism operates more or less efficiently, the relations between the three classes, capitalist, middle class and working class, are maintained with a degree of equilibrium. The middle class follows the capitalist class, and even drags the workers along with them through the labor bureaucracy. The class struggle, while constantly upsetting this equilibrium, doesn’t fundamentally destroy it.But as soon as capitalism enters its decline, this relationship of class forces is sharply altered and the brittle political superstructure resting on the previously stable class relationships begins to crack up.The crisis of capitalism brings ruin and despair to the middle class and the working class. The alternating currents of boom and bust resolve into the alternatives of catastrophic war or catastrophic depression. This whole process creates an unbearable social tension, and a collective conviction arises that a change must absolutely be made.In such times the working class is presented with the opportunity to take the helm and steer society out of the capitalist morass. The middle class, suffering acutely from the effects of the capitalist crisis, is at that point the natural ally of the working class and would readily follow its lead toward a fundamental change in the social system.But should the working class falter, should it prove unable to rise to the tasks imposed by revolutionary times, then the whole situation deteriorates. All the worst features of the middle class – its prejudices, its inability to act as a cohesive class pursuing its own interests, its collective hysteria in times of crisis – become favorable factors for the rise of a fascist movement.The fascists then issue a counterfeit of the revolutionary program that the workers’ organizations failed to present. They turn the program into its opposite. While appealing to the mass feeling that some change is absolutely essential, the change which they offer is a counter-revolutionary fascist change. All this is dressed up with whatever unrestrained demagogy the moment requires.At the same time the capitalists, who have lost the ability to rule through middle-class liberal politicians and the labor bureaucracy, become receptive to the idea of using the fascist movement to establish their unquestioned rule by means of a blood-nurge of the working class and the establishment of the iron-heel dictatorship of Big Business.This, in broad outline, is the perspective that confronts this country. There is no use looking the other way, or bemoaning our fate. There is no use complaining that the alternatives of fascism or socialism confront us too soon – that we need more time.The alternatives are here, now. The fascist movement is not waiting. The workers cannot and dare not wait.Thus the problem of problems now before us is to hasten the awakening of consciousness in the working class to the fact that the next few years will decide who will rule in the United States. A showdown crisis is before us. Either the capitalists will rule through a fascist dictatorship, or the workers will rule through a Workers and Farmers Government.Those who think that all is lost and that fascism must succeed are the worst traitors and liars. The American workers have a tremendous capacity to rise to historic needs. The workers have learned a great deal since they first organized and beat the corporations, in the Thirties. Everything intelligent, everything heroic, everything that made the American workers the most productive and most militant working class in the world will become aroused and active in the mortal struggle with fascism."
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"content": "For our part, we proceed with the utmost confidence. The present labor leadership will be shoved aside. Its pro-capitalist political program will be rejected by the new, young, militant layers of leader-fighters which are today taking shape even during the darkest moments of reaction. And the program and leadership of the revolutionary socialists will be embraced by these millions of proletarian fighters who will smash and scatter the fascist movement.July 10, 1954Top of pageWeiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageLast updated: 14 April 2009"
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"content": "Murry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurry WeissThe Problem of Smashing McCarthyismA Marxist Analysis and Proposal(January 1954)From Fourth International, Vol. 15 No. 1, Winter 1954, pp. 3–9.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).WHEN Eisenhower was sworn in a year ago, the most authoritative newspapers confidently predicted that the General would squelch McCarthy without any difficulty. But the Wisconsin upstart, whose name has become synonymous with witch hunting, has by no means been squelched. On the contrary, his power has grown enormously in one year of the Eisenhower regime.Two questions deserve close attention from the outset of any analysis of McCarthy and McCarthyism: What is the nature of his power and what is its source?One school of thought, represented in high circles of the Republican and Democratic parties, contends that McCarthy is absurd and McCarthyism is a hoax. The stock in trade of this school is to measure McCarthy’s “accomplishments” with their own witchhunt rule: “How many Communists has McCarthy caught?”McCarthy, they point out, began his career in big-time witch hunting with a sensational stunt at Wheeling, West Virginia, Feb. 9, 1950. Speaking to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, he announced,“I have here in my hand a list of 205 ... a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”In one day the charge was altered to 205 “bad security risks,” and “57 card-carrying Communists.” Ten days later this was reduced to “three big Communists.” Then it was raised to “81 cases.”The proponents of the “absurdity” theory of McCarthyism triumphantly point out that to this day not one “Communist” has been uncovered in the State Department as a result of McCarthy’s “exposé.”The same point is made about McCarthy’s investigations at the Fort Monmouth radar research project. Headlines blared “Spy Ring,” “McCarthy Charges Soviet Got Secrets,” “Monmouth Figure Linked to Hiss Ring.” McCarthy reported 12, then 27 suspended victims as if they were “spies” caught red-handed.Again when the smoke cleared, not one “spy,” or one proved “Communist” had been discovered. McCarthy blithely shifted his story to “potential sabotage.” His opponents scornfully exposed these maneuvers. In the meantime, McCarthy set up shop, and alerted every fascist hoodlum and reactionary bigot in the United States that he was their man. The “Madman” TheoryAlongside the theory of “absurdity” is the “madman” theory of McCarthyism. How could anyone but a madman accuse Truman, Acheson, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, along with war-time Chief of Staff Marshall, all in one breath, of a Moscow-directed conspiracy during World War II?Most of the anti-McCarthy Republicans and Democrats attack McCarthy’s type of witch hunting as “irresponsible,” “reckless,” and “unfair.” They accept McCarthy’s premise, the internal and external “red menace.” But they don’t fully realize what they are accepting.Another group of opponents of McCarthy, such as I.F. Stone and the liberals of the Nation, say flatly that McCarthy’s “red menace” in America is a hoax. They grant the international “red menace,” but describe the internal domestic menace as sheer fabrication. This group doesn’t fully realize what it is rejecting in McCarthyism.McCarthy’s witch hunting has a character basically different from all others. Leaving aside the common denominator of a reactionary, pro-war, pro-capitalist program, McCarthy proceeds from different premises, and has different objectives. Before McCarthy, the large-scale witch hunt was motivated as a “security measure.” Its primary aim was to depict the world anti-capitalist revolution as a “Kremlin conspiracy” and to smear in advance all actual or potential anti-capitalist opposition at home as a “fifth column.” In other words, Truman’s witch hunt pursued the actual aim of lining up the American people for Wall Street’s counter-revolutionary cold war; the ostensible aim was to prevent internal treachery.McCarthy has a different formula. He contends that “great treachery” has already taken place. It must now be uncovered and avenged. A repetition of the “great treachery” must be prevented. For McCarthy, the number one task in the “security” field is to root out the traitors who sold us out during the last war.There is a big difference between this and the witch hunt started by Truman. Superficially the difference appears to be merely a question of quantity. It looks like McCarthy is using the witch hunt against some of the chief witch hunters. And that is true as far as it goes.But there is a deeper aspect to the problem which explains the source of McCarthy’s power and the difference between McCarthy and the run-of-the-mill capitalist reactionary. The Middle ClassIn order to fix precisely McCarthy’s place in American politics it is necessary to trace briefly the recent economic and political evolution of the American middle class.During the last dozen years the middle class has swung steadily to the right. Aside from ups and downs, and taking into account notable exceptions, the middle class has profited by the Second World War and the post-war armaments boom. The comeback of the Republican Party of Big Business is the political expression of this swing. The big capitalists were able to offer the country a war prosperity. This attracted a large section of the farmers and small businessmen and even a section of the workers to the party which is openly the instrument of Big Business.The Second World War seemed to open the perspective of a long reign of prosperity based on America’s conquest of the world. Every other country was ruined, but didn’t the US come out on top once again? The Luce publications even projected a “Pax Americana,” an “American Century,” and drew comparisons with the Roman empire of antiquity and the British of modern times."
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"content": "But conquest turned into bitter defeat. The world revolutionary anti-capitalist upsurge, the elimination of China and Eastern Europe from the capitalist orbit, the growth of the Soviet bloc, destroyed the perspective of endless national enrichment at the expense of the world. The rosy dream of an American century turned into a nightmare of fear and insecurity. McCarthy was the first to seriously tap the elements of social fury building up in the disoriented middle class as a result of this unforeseen turn of affairs.In a speech to the US Senate, June 15, 1951, McCarthy posed the question of “why we fell from our position as the most powerful nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of declared weakness.” His answer was. very simple: It is the result of a Kremlin-directed conspiracy, headed in the United States, not by Browder and Foster, but by Roosevelt, Truman, Acheson, the State Department and war-time Chief of Staff Marshall.The answer to why the US fell from power, said McCarthy, cannot be obtained “without uncovering a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black, as to dwarf any previous such venture, in the history of man.”In a television appearance, shortly after the Senate speech, he elaborated on this theme:“In view of the fact that we’ve been losing, losing this war to international communism at the rate of 100 million people a year in a general war and losing the Korean war, a disgraceful planned disaster, that perhaps we should examine the background of the men who have done the planning and let the American people decide whether these individuals are stupid, whether we’ve lost because of stumbling, fumbling idiocy, or because they planned it that way.”In a word, he left it up to the American people to decide “whether these individuals (Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall and Eisenhower) have been dupes ... or whether, they are traitors.”Such is McCarthy’s explanation in a nutshell: All our troubles, the cold war, the Korean war, inflation, strikes, the threat of depression, the farmers’ troubles, the anxieties, the fear of atomic annihilation, the fear of “Communist aggression,” and any other ills, real or imaginary, are due to “Communist” treason in high places.We were sold out by “traitors,” “dupes” and “eggheads.” We were betrayed by “perverts” in the State Department, and by the “twisted thinking intellectuals (who) have taken over both the Democratic and Republican parties.” Fascist PremiseThe conclusions flowing from McCarthy’s formula are ominous and sweeping.To the ruling capitalist politicians they present an awesome prospect. It means a complete overhauling of the government apparatus, from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter that McCarthy’s formula is even a bigger lie than Truman’s. The important thing is that McCarthy has a sizable audience who find in this lie a rationalization for their fury and frustration.At first sight it appears that McCarthy’s formula of “high treason” is a matter of purely internal interest to the capitalist class. One group of politicians accuses the other of the worst crimes. Of what concern is this to the workers? Actually the question is of tremendous importance to the workers.In an atmosphere of impending social crisis, when the props have been taken out from under the world conditions for the economic stability of American capitalism, McCarthy’s formula is a ready-made premise for a fascist program. The middle class feels betrayed and insecure. It feels the hot breath of depression on its neck. It must, find a new orientation. McCarthy makes his bid for the support of this mass, and offers a way out – destroy the traitorous gang in power and replace them, with leaders bathed in the fire of McCarthyism.With this formula McCarthy lays the groundwork for posing as the crusading enemy of the scoundrels in high places.By accusing the previous Democratic administration, the Democratic Party, and half the Republican Party of treachery, dupery, bungling, corruption and blundering mismanagement, he bids to become the champion of the “small people” who are Justifiably suspicious of the “big shots” in high places.He hopes to become the champion of the discontented and the opponent of the status quo.This kind of demagogy by McCarthy, when taken together with other symptoms, signifies an attempt to rally a mass movement around a fascist banner.The “big shots” of course have an out. They can avoid being smeared as “traitors” by the simple device of joining McCarthy, and many of them have taken that course. Or they can stave off the day when they will be smeared bv keeping out of McCarthy’s way and hoping he won’t notice them, and many have taken that course.The theme of “Communist” treason in the top institutions of government can be turned high or low according to the political situation and the extent to which McCarthy is ready to develop his independence from the Republican Party. But there are corollaries to the theme which can be kept going at all times.Rooting out “spies” and “Communists” who were covered by the high traitors (through deliberate intention or criminal stupidity) is a year-around business for McCarthy. It keeps the pot boiling. It creates the atmosphere of hysteria and terror that he needs.“High treason” in foreign policy has its inevitable counterpart in “high treason” in domestic policy. Here, McCarthy does not have to be original. He can simply lift the point out of the Republican program. McCarthy has “revealed” that the Democratic administration was selling out the country to the Russians. But the Republicans have long said that the New Deal-Fair Deal was “creeping socialism.”McCarthy, who is not interested in fine distinctions, has a ready-made hook-up. While the Democrats were selling out the world position of America to the Russians, they were at the same time introducing “Communism” at home.And then it is well known that practically all the trade union officials supported the New Deal-Fair Deal. Obviously they were in on the “great conspiracy.”"
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{
"content": "McCarthy, like every fascist before him, will say: “I am not opposed to unions. I am only opposed to the ‘Communist traitors’ who run them.” He can very well prove his friendship for unionism by pressing for “free” 100% American unions, to replace the “Communist infested” AFL and CIO.And with a mob of fascist supporters, McCarthy will set out to destroy the “Communist” unions, by direct action, in the good old-fashioned American way, so much admired by lynchers, the Klan and vigilantes.If anyone thinks such prospects are “fantastic” they had better read McCarthy’s speeches more closely.Thus we come to the conclusion: The source of McCarthy’s power is a large layer of the middle class who are deeply disturbed by the world and domestic crises. This layer is often decisive in the balance of electoral power. That is why McCarthy wields such great power within the Republican party. More Than a Witch HunterBut McCarthy is distinguished from the rest of the reactionary capitalist politician’s. While arising out of the general atmosphere of the witch hunt, McCarthyism is yet different from it. McCarthyism is the American fascist movement at a particular stage of development.The most convincing evidence of this is the inability of the old-line political machines to stop McCarthy. All attempts have ended in fiasco, with McCarthy stronger than ever. It isn’t that the machines don’t want to break him. They can’t break him.McCarthy brawled his way up from the political bush leagues of Wisconsin to a position of great power in the US Senate. He reduced Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican” himself, to the position of a henchman. Eisenhower is impotent before his power.And the Democratic Party opposition periodically collapses and capitulates, each time more miserably than before.Imprudent Congressmen who dared to cross him have had their hides nailed up on the walls of Capitol Hill as warning to all future critics: If you want to stay in office, don’t tangle with McCarthy.McCarthy conducts his intervention in election campaigns along the same lines as he conducts his investigating committee. If a witness or a candidate is not a stool-pigeon or a McCarthyite captive, he is automatically an agent of the Kremlin. The mildest thing McCarthy can say about such people is:“It appears that (the accused) never actually signed up in the Communist Party, and never paid dues ...”The capitalist political machines can break any upstart who is a part of their machine. But when a fascist political machine arises, then it is a different matter.If the Republican and Democratic party machines have proven impotent in curbing McCarthy by direct attacks, their attempts to eliminate him by outflanking maneuvers have proved nothing less than catastrophic. The most dramatic example of this was, in the recent Republican-sponsored spy-smear of ex-president Truman by Attorney General Brownell. The Republican high command thought it could kill two birds with one stone. It could use McCarthy’s technique to win a badly needed election victory in California. And at the same time, it could deflate McCarthy by stealing his thunder.McCarthy was the real gainer in the whole episode. After Truman tried to defend himself in a national broadcast, McCarthy demanded and got $300,000 worth of free radio-TV time, attacked both Truman and Eisenhower, and brought the issue right back to where he wanted it – for McCarthy or for the “spies.”McCarthy’s fascist machine cannot be broken by capitalist politicians. The only political force that can destroy McCarthy is one completely independent from the Democratic and Republican parties; namely, the working class, organized in its own political party.The point is that capitalist reaction has developed a split personality. The ruling power itself has developed pronounced police-state features. The enormous growth of the FBI secret police, the vast increase in the power of the military hierarchy, and the increasing concentration of special powers in the Executive (Truman’s unauthorized declaration of War in Korea) are all features of a growing Bonapartist tendency in the capitalist state.HARRY S. TRUMAN“... launched an offensive against all democratic traditions ...”The witch hunt under Truman already evinced the inability of capitalism to rule by the old methods. In addition to repressive laws against labor’ and the increase of direct intervention by the state in economic affairs, the Truman regime was compelled to launch an offensive against all democratic traditions, become more and more “anti-popular,” isolated and estranged from mass support. The crisis of the 20-year coalition between the labor bureaucracy and the capitalist state began under Truman.The rupture of that coalition was consummated under Eisenhower.But alongside the “police statification” of the structure of capitalist rule has come the first significant signs of the emergence of a fascist mobilization. McCarthyism, while playing the role of pace-setter in the witch hunt, is at the same time developing a marked independence from the traditional parties of capitalism and from the old state apparatus.McCarthy swings a club over the heads of the old-line capitalist politicians. It is the club of the mass movement that has rallied behind him. This is the most important element of the political situation in the United States today. It is a symptom of the results of prolonged delay in the formation of an independent Labor Party. It is a sign of the emergence of a new and far more threatening anti-labor machine.The emergence of an independent fascist movement, headed by a powerful political machine in Congress, with a platform based on the theme of “national betrayal” by the war-time leaders, with powerful financial backing, and the coalescence of the fragmented fascist organizations of the past under its banner, is the warning-signal to the American working class: Once again history is posing the choice – fascism or socialism.It is important to recall that Hitler began in Germany with the theme of “betrayal from within.” And this remained the basic ingredient of all Nazi demagogy. The “Communist conspiracy,” the “international Jewish bankers,” “Russian aggression,” were all linked to the central theme: Germany was defeated in the First World War because of “betrayal at Versailles.” In order to restore Germany to its rightful place, the criminal authors of this treason had to. be exposed and extirpated."
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{
"content": "Hitler’s social demagogy was also built around this theme. Hitler didn’t merely compete with the Social Democrats and Communist Party in social demands. He linked the demagogic promises of the Nazi party with the action crusade necessary to save Germany and destroy the “treacherous conspiracy from within.”The analogy to Hitlerism, is valid if we understand its limitations. The most important of these pertains to the stage of development. It could give rise to the most serious errors to identify McCarthyisrn with the Hitler movement of 1931–32, in the period of its march to power.Hitlerism, as all fascist movements which became fully developed mass organizations, matured to the degree that the working class defaulted a series of revolutionary opportunities and failed to resolve the social crisis through socialist revolution. In Germany, the attempts of the working class to take power in 1918, 1923, and to a certain degree even as late as 1929, failed as a result of the successive defaults of proletarian leadership.It was this failure which gave rise to a tumultuous mass growth of fascism and the possibility of its taking power and crushing the working class through civil war. With the default of working class leadership, the middle class, frustrated in its hopes for a solution to its problems under the leadership of the Working class, became easy prey for fascist demagogy and was attracted to the anti-capitalist facade of the fascist program. Thus they became raw material for an anti-labor militia. In the name of anti-capitalism the fascists mobilized the middle class of Germany to do the work of monopoly capitalist reaction. Subsequently the mass organizations of the middle class, particularly their armed organizations, were beheaded and demobilized, but only after they had accomplished their mission of destroying the organizations of the working class. In AmericaIf we study closely the history of the United States since the birth of the CIO we see analogous elements of default. The CIO displayed tremendous attraction for the “small people” of the country. CIO was the “magic” symbol of new life for the oppressed.Fascist and semi-fascist formations that tried to directly challenge the CIO were hurled back. But with the breaking of the Little Steel strike by a type of fascist campaign, modeled on the Mohawk Valley Formula in the spring of 1937, the pendulum began to swing toward the appearance of more aggressive fascist activity. This swing was helped by the failure of the CIO to fulfill its promise of becoming an independent political party of the workers.On the basis of this “default,” the economic recession of the late Thirties and the social instability preceding the outbreak of the war gave rise to such figures as Mayor Hague of Jersey City, Father Coughlin, Pelley, and Gerald L.K. Smith.The Second World War cut across this development. War by its very nature rallies all the potential fascist elements to the existing state apparatus. It puts a uniform on the discontented and frustrated middle class; it offers, in its own distorted way, some hope of change; it provides action to the middle-class and de-classed youth; it vastly expands the officer corps. In addition, the war brought full employment to the workers and enrichment to the middle class.With the end of the war, in anticipation of demobilization, the fascists began an intensive exploratory operation. Would-be fascist veteran organizations sprang up everywhere. The prospect of using veterans, as anti-labor shock troops was very tempting to big capital and to a new crop of fascist contenders.But the colossal strike wave of 1945-46 answered this fascist dream. American labor mobilized the veterans on the picket lines.However, the fact that the official leadership of the labor movement supported the war and the no-strike pledge, and continued its adherence to the capitalist parties, constituted a manifest default in working-class leadership which laid the ground for the current stage of political development.The years of post-war prosperity are giving away to symptoms of economic crisis. Above all, confidence has been destroyed. And the first signs of major disturbances in the middle class are observable. These signs are contradictory. On the one hand, there is the indubitable popularity of McCarthy, a sign of grave importance. On the other hand, there is the recent tendency of the middle-class vote to swing to the Democratic Party.These and other contradictory symptoms are indicative of the immaturity of the situation for the emergence of a full-fledged fascist mobilization. The world crisis of capitalism has not yet erupted in full force in the United States. With the outbreak of the crisis the pendulum will undoubtedly swing to mass working class radicalization, before it swings to fascist reaction. And it will never swing to the fascists if the working class carries out its mission, breaks with capitalist politics, mobilizes the people of the United States behind a socialist program and takes the power into its own hands.But the basic elements of the contradictory alternative of the future – fascist victory or socialist victory – are already implicit in the current political situation. The contest will not take place in separated time sequences – first a pure working class radicalization, and then, if it fails to reach its historic goal of workers power, a pure fascist mass mobilization. The tendencies toward socialist revolution and fascist counter-revolution will run concurrently. The American workers will have to cope with fascism from, here on in. Whether it will be “incipient” fascism, or full-blown mass fascism, with all “classical” features in full evidence, will depend on the working class, on how successfully it wages the struggle.The European experience teaches us that the fight against fascism will fail if it is not based on a revolutionary anti-capitalist program and the perspective of workers’ power. But part of the education of the working class, in the process of acquiring such a program, is the direct struggle with the fascist threat. McCarthy and Labor"
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{
"content": "When McCarthy came to Washington in 1946, before he was even seated as a junior Senator from Wisconsin, he called a press conference. Two capable journalists, Jack Anderson and Ronald May, in their book McCarthy, The Man, The Senator, The ’Ism, tell how startled the reporters were at this arrogance of a “rookie” Senator: “The reporters were so amazed at his audacity that they showed up mainly out of curiosity.” The subject of the press conference was the strike of the coal miners.“Now then,” said McCarthy, “about this coal strike, I’ve got a solution. The army should draft the striking coal miners. That would solve the problem.”“What about Lewis?” asked a reporter.“Draft him too.”“And what if they refused (to mine coal)?” asked another reporter.“Then they could be court-martialed for insubordination, and you know what that means.”Anderson and May report:“The newsmen could hardly believe their ears. One of them, searching for a headline, asked: ‘You mean you would line up men like Lewis and have them shot?’ Joe (McCarthy) shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘what else?’” JOHN L. LEWISMcCarthy: “Draft him too ... Should be court-martialed.”A few days later the New York Times quoted McCarthy:“... I believe the President should use his powers to immediately draft John L. Lewis into the armed services. Lewis should be directed to order his miners to mine coal. If he does not do that, he should be court-martialed. We should go straight down the line. If subordinates of Lewis fail to order the miners back, they should be court-martialed. All this talk about you can’t put 400,000 miners in jail is a lot of stuff. They won’t go to jail. They will mine coal first.”This was McCarthy’s first venture in making national headlines. The anti-labor theme is significant. McCarthy subsequently abandoned this direct anti-labor belligerence. After all, such fire-eating statements about action against strikers are not suitable to the fascist demagogue in the period of his rise to prominence. As a matter of fact, McCarthy today maintains a studied silence on the question of labor. In a Congress bristling with Taft-Hartleyism, he is conspicuously silent about such legislative anti-labor measures.His approach is different. In the specific McCarthyite formula of witch hunting, the attack on the labor movement is oblique, and therefore, for the time being, more effective. This was demonstrated in. his “investigation” of General Electric.Opponents of McCarthyism are fond of citing such historic precedents as the witch hunt in England in the 17th century and the Salem, witchcraft trials. In their book, Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May devote a chapter to an historic episode:“Three hundred years ago, England was swept by a wave of hysteria against witches. Fear and suspicions haunted the people ... Then a man named Matthew Hopkins appeared on the scene with a new and ‘infallible’ method of detecting witches; it consisted of some original techniques in torture. Within a short time he became one of the most powerful men in England, feared even by the King himself, who conferred upon Hopkins the title of ‘His Majesty’s Witch-Finder General’ ... No one dared to oppose him, for he had power of life and death over all ‘suspects’ brought before him to be ‘tested.’ Those who failed his tests were put to death; and for each victim Hopkins was paid a sum of money ... But his fees grew more exorbitant, and the atmosphere more chaotic, until a group of officials took matters into their own hands and arrested the Witch-Finder General himself – as a witch. He was subjected to a series of tests so severe that his health was completely broken, and soon afterward he died and was buried at Mistley, August 12, 1647.”The inference of this historic parallel is that McCarthyism is a virulent stage of a disease which will run its course and destroy itself. The trouble with the analogy is the different historic settings. England of the 17th century was at its infancy as a capitalist nation, the United States of 1953 is part of the world capitalist system, in its death agony.The historical tendency of capitalism in its ascendency was to throw off the dead hand of medievalism with its witches and witch hunters. This was part of the main trend after the English revolution led by Cromwell. The capitalists sought to change all social and political relations in the interests of freedom for investment of capital. The power of witchcraft vanished in face of the new forces. Democratic parliamentarism became the form of political rule most suited to capital at this stage.In the period of capitalist decline which set in with the First World War, capitalism inclined to shed its historically acquired democratic forms. It showed the closest affinity for every reactionary, semi-feudal relic in world culture. It became retrogressive. Declining capitalism in Europe thrust nation after nation into fascist barbarism.Now the threat of fascism has become manifest in the US With a fascist victory in this country the historic cost would be incalculable. The barbarism of Hitlerism would prove to be a mere dress rehearsal for the barbarism of American fascism. A fascist America, with an enslaved working class, would threaten the whole world with barbarism.But the time is not yet ripe for counter-revolution in the United States. Socialist revolution will have its chance before fascist counter-revolution. However, if the socialist revolution is to succeed, a sharp turn must be made in the policy and leadership of the working class. Independent Political ActionThe failure, after the formation of the CIO, to organize an independent Labor Party, opened the reactionary swing of American politics, which in turn helped mature the conditions for the reappearance of a more powerful fascist movement. This failure was not written in the stars. It was thrust upon the workers by a bureaucratic caste of “leaders” who fell under the influence of the American capitalist politicians and proved incapable of tearing loose."
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{
"content": "Even now it is clear that the formation of an independent Labor Party would change qualitatively the whole political situation. McCarthyism would be scattered to the four winds, and before it could assemble the pieces for a counter-offensive, the workers could take political power in the United States with the vast majority, of the people behind them. Such are the objective possibilities.But everything depends, not on these objective possibilities, which have long been ripe, for a socialist reorganisation of society; everything depends on the subjective factor, that is, on the factor of working class leadership, consciousness and will – in a word, on the revolutionary party.As the social crisis deepens – and the objective factors guarantee that this will happen – the working class will seek the way out on the road of radical solutions. The labor bureaucracy will stand in their way. And standing in the way of the working class mass surge toward the revolutionary road, it will stand in the way of the united front of the working class and the middle class on the program of socialist opposition against Big Capital.If the bureaucracy succeeds in preventing the junction of an anti-capitalist front of workers and farmers, the road will be opened to the mass growth of the McCarthyite movement far beyond its present dimensions.Thus the problem of leadership becomes the problem of overthrowing the dead weight of the existing bankrupt bureaucracy and building a new revolutionary left wing leadership in the American labor movement.The policy of the labor leadership of all wings, except the revolutionary socialist, is a compound of cowardly silence, capitulation and dependence on the Democratic Party in the fight against McCarthyism.It would seem that the labor bureaucracy, including the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, is bound and determined to commit the very mistakes in the United States that paved the way for the victory of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco in Europe. The bureaucrats are in no mood to profit by the tragic experience of the European labor movement.Is it a hopeless cause then to think that we can prevent the victory of McCarthyism?Not in the least! We do not depend in the slightest on “convincing” Reuther and Meany. But we do depend on the fusion of the ideas, experience and cadre of the Socialist Workers Party with the mass of workers in the United States. As the social crisis deepens, the workers will move to radical solutions. But they will encounter not only the obstacle of the right-wing bureaucracy; they will also find an enormous advantage in the left-wing leadership built around the SWP. This junction of the radicalized worker mass and the revolutionary socialist left wing will seal the doom of the bureaucracy.The American Trotskyists have never been and never will be mere “talkers” on the question of fascism. We have the only consistent record of action in the struggle against the American fascists. We already possess a large fund of experience in the fight. And our party is determined to imbue the whole American working class with the spirit of militant combat against the fascists ...Our conception of fighting the fascists is to crush them in the egg. Never give them a chance to become powerful antagonists. For every blow the fascists deliver against any section of the working class or minorities, we propose that labor strike back with ten blows.The fact that there are deep traditions in the American working class that support such a program was demonstrated to the whole country by the militant action of the San Francisco longshoremen last Nov. 3 when they organized a 24-hour protest strike against the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee.This model action of the San Francisco longshoremen shows that once the American workers start moving and recognize the McCarthyites for what they are, they will make short shrift of American fascism.Meanwhile, left-wing workers must pitch with all their might and hasten the mobilization of a working-class, fighting, anti-fascist front. Above all we must fight for a revolutionary socialist program against McCarthyism. For it is only through the adoption of such a program by the working class that, a final victory against fascism will be possible.January 18, 1954 Top of pageMurry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageLast updated: 22 March 2019"
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{
"content": "Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main PageMurry WeissCase History of an Experiment(Spring 1960)From International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No.2, Spring 1960, pp.49-53.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Why did American Socialist fold up? It could be charged to a failure of nerve. But closer study yields some instructive lessonsAFTER six years of publication, the American Socialist, a monthly magazine which made considerable impression in radical and student circles when it first appeared, announced December 1959, “This is our last issue.” In a statement to their readers the editors admitted that the decision to close up shop “stems from more than just financial difficulties.”What then were their political reasons? The editors of the American Socialist felt that the promise of a favorable regroupment among radical forces in the US had not been realized. In the absence of a radical upsurge, they explained, they never thought that a regroupment would result in a new socialist party. But they did hope “that it might be possible to start a modest educational society outlining a body of ideas and approaches for a New Left if enough of the old radicals took the cure, rid themselves of their past misconceptions, derelictions, and bad habits, and grew up to understand the requirements of the epoch.” This was an illusion, they conclude,“In retrospect, we can see that the regroupment discussion of several years ago had no chance. The decay had gone too far, and the atmosphere in the country was too forbidding to encourage a new beginning.”So what should be done now? The prospects appear dispiriting.“There are a number of possibilities open to us to overcome our difficulties, but these add up to converting ourselves into still another messianic sectlet. We have rejected such a course in the past and we do so now.”Has the American Socialist then nothing further to say? It seems not.“We have already exceeded the life-span for non-institutional ‘little magazines’ in this country and the time has now clearly come to close up this particular venture.”What of other publications or other currents in the radical movement? Should readers of the American Socialist turn to any of these? The editors seem embarrassed. They say that the socialist movement must make “fresh investigations” into many questions including “a number of classic socialist assumptions [not identified]. But we never believed – we do not believe now – that the Kremlin or the State Department were the best mentors, overtly or covertly, wholly or partially, for these researches.” Interpreting this Aesopian language, we take this as advice to stay away from both the Communist party and the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation.What of the Socialist Workers party and the Trotskyist movement generally? You would never guess from reading the American Socialist that editors Bert Cochran, Harry Braverman and J. Geller had spent the greater part of their adult life in the Trotskyist movement, breaking from it only in 1954. Do they finally draw some kind of balance sheet on this experience in the final issue of the magazine they founded? No. They conclude their experiment as they began it – without an explanation, without a programmatic accounting. Like fleeting, ghostlike birds of passage one could say of them: “From nothing, through nothing, to nothing.”Cochran, Braverman and Geller thus end their magazine experiment with ideological bankruptcy. Although they gratuitously include the whole socialist movement in this, they are really only speaking for themselves. To indict the movement as a whole, it is necessary to do more than assert; it is necessary to discuss points of disagreement, to attempt to prove one’s contentions. In other words, it is necessary to engage in ideological struggle.But this is exactly what the three editors have always refused to do, avoiding controversy by assuming a blase manner: It is all too, too wearisome to squabble about ancient issues that interest no one but devotees of sectlets.With all its appeal for the tired and the demoralized, such posturing signifies the abandonment not simply of Marxism but of all science, all method and all efforts to test contending programs in the laboratory of experience.Is this criticism too harsh? In defense of Cochran, Braverman and Geller it can be argued that in their final statement they profess optimism about the prospects of the sixties.“From a number of signs,” they say, “it would appear that the tensions which have built up in our society will lead to a new burst of political creativity in the coming decade.”We agree with that forecast. But for Marxists the next question is how should we prepare for the new upsurge? How can we help transmit to the young socialists of the sixties the precious lessons of more than a century of Marxism? Don’t such tasks call for organized Marxist activity, even if it is reduced to the bare essential of running a mimeograph?The editorial trio apparently thought of this – and excluded it:“Of course, the Left is by now too shrunken to permit any continuity between the movements of the thirties and any manifestations in the sixties.” (Our emphasis.)What does this mean? If there is no possibility of any continuity between the radical movement of the thirties and the coming movement of the sixties, then the next generation, which will undoubtedly be called upon to solve fateful problems, will be left, hanging by itself; it will be excluded from the benefits of learning from the-experience of the generation of the thirties, in both their positive and negative aspects. "
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{
"content": "THEY are condemned to start from scratch in considering such mighty questions as the failure of the working class parties to stop the rise of fascism in Europe; the failure of the labor movement to prevent World War II; the liquidation of the revolutionary-socialist parties into class-collaborationist popular fronts in Europe; the rise of a bureaucratic dictatorial regime in the Soviet Union; the stifling of all independence and revolutionary integrity of the Communist parties of the world by the Kremlin; the successive betrayals of reformist Social Democracy; the decimation of radicalism in America due to supporting capitalist parties; the defeat of the militant and radical wing of the American trade-union movement and the rise of the present labor bureaucracy ...If the Marxist movement today does not do everything in its power to transmit such lessons, then it is indeed bankrupt. And if one argues that there’s nothing wrong with Marxism but no humans in this country exist capable of giving continuity to its body of thought, as Cochran does, it comes to the same thing. A theory that resembles some “truth” of the spirit world, unconnected with any living tendency, is hardly a useful guide to action.WHY accept such a nihilistic diagnosis? It is not related to social reality but to emotional collapse. The editors express despair at the incapacity of the “old radicals” to rid themselves of their past “misconceptions, derelictions, and bad habits,” their inability to grow up “to understand the requirements of the epoch.” Wouldn’t a Marxist begin by explaining such phenomena in order to overcome them? Precisely what were these “misconceptions, derelictions and bad habits?” In what way did the old generation fail to understand the “requirements of the epoch\"? And what are these requirements?The American radical movement showed great promise at the beginning of the century; it became a powerful force among industrial workers in the thirties; then it suffered rout and demoralization in the fifties. How did the misconceptions and derelictions (not to speak of bad habits) lead to this? Aren’t the youth entitled to this wisdom?If the movement of the coming decade is to succeed where the movement of the thirties failed, such questions must be answered by the Marxists. This will be demanded by young militants who will enter the ranks in the years to come.For the knowledge-hungry youth turning to socialism this work of Marxism provides indispensable answers to their urgent questions. But the youth will not find even a hint to the answers in the American Socialist. The editors abandoned their project, bitterly skeptical, disillusioned, without anything to say to the future.If this were merely the default of a few individuals, the subject would hardly be worth pursuing. But there is much more involved. Important lessons can be learned from the evolution of the group that launched the American Socialist. This evolution is itself a part, of the story of the decline of the American radicalism in the fifties. To understand the main features of this group and what made them act as they did is therefore part of the preparation for the future we have been talking about.In essence Cochran and his followers broke from the Socialist Workers Party in 1954 over the concept and role of a Leninist party.The American Trotskyist movement was founded in 1928 as part of the international struggle begun by Lenin and Trotsky against the rise of Stalinism. The bureaucratic caste that arose in the Soviet Union displaced democratic workers rule. In other countries the Communist parties were reduced to servile appendages of the Kremlin. Consequently, they were unable to measure up to their tasks in one revolutionary situation after another.The Leninist tendency, led by Leon Trotsky, carried on the chore of expounding the theories of Marxism and Leninism against the systematic revisionism of the Stalinists and their unending falsification, slander, frame-ups, and murder. In every crucial situation in the world the cadre of Leninists, called “Trotskyists” by the Soviet bureaucrats, fought for revolutionary-socialist policies and painstakingly analyzed the causes of the defeats resulting from the Stalinization of the Communist parties.This work was carried on first by the Left Opposition, which sought to reform the Communist parties, and then the Fourth International, which was founded after the Third International and the Communist parties adhering to it had lost all elementary revolutionary reflexes. The historical significance of this was the maintenance of the continuity of Marxism throuahout the period of Stalinist reaction. The new generation that came to radicalism found intact the most advanced scientific theory of the class struggle. Without this, Stalinism would have succeeded not only in blighting the first workers state with a police regime and in wrecking many promising revolutionary opportunities, but in burying the socialist “memory” of the working class for decades to come. THE single most important precept of Marxism rescued from Stalinist revisionism is the need for an independent party of the working class. Lenin devoted his life to advancing and refining this principle, bequeathing a rich legacy to subsequent generations. Lenin’s key thought was that the party is the concrete manifestation of the program and the indispensable agency for giving it life. Marxism would be palatable to many dilettantes and dabblers in radicalism if it weren’t so insistent upon converting its program into an organized working-class political struggle against the parties of the rich and the middle class.The American Trotskyist movement from the outset fought for this Leninist view. In 1940 a petty-bourgeois opposition, reflecting the pressure of the oncoming war, sought to persuade the party to give up unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. The debate then also turned on the Leninist concept of the party. The anti-Leninist faction headed by James Burnham and Max Shachtman felt itself “imprisoned” the moment it sought to reduce key principles to mere phrases – good for times of peace but not so good in war."
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