New Interventions, Volume 13, no 4

Breivik and the Islamophobes

Ten Years Since 11 September 2001

Islam and Western Intellectuals

Isaac Deutscher

The Legacy of Paul Levi

Trotskyism, ‘Pabloism’ and Vanguardism

Reform, Revolution and the State

A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion

Volume 13, no 4, Summer 2011, £2.00

NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 4

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New Interventions Volume 13, no 4, Summer 2011

Theodor Bergmann, The Tragedy of Paul Levi 3

A look at the life and works of the noted German Marxist

Mike Jones and Alistair Mitchell, Isaac Deutscher 9

A critical appraisal of Trotsky’s biographer

Chris Gray, The Heritage We Find Indefensible and the Myth of ‘Pabloism’ 18

Orthodox Trotskyism, the Pabloite bogey and the dangers of vanguardism

Harry Ratner, Capturing the Capitalist Citadel 22

Reform, revolution and the capitalist state

Arthur Trusscott, Ten Years On 27

Did al Qaeda change everything on 11 September 2001?

Terry Liddle, War on the Heavens 32

The rise of the ‘New Atheism’ and its meaning for socialists

Andrew Coates, The Flight of the Intellectuals? 34

A look at Paul Berman’s writings on Islam and Western intellectuals

Mike Jones, Kosovo: The Successful Intervention? 39

The rise of the gangster-state in Kosovo

Paul Flewers, Porterhouse Bloomsbury? 40

What does the New College of the Humanities offer?

Mike Belbin, The Lone Crusader and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice 42

Anders Behring Breivik and his theoretical influences

Reports from the USA 44

How to resist and reverse the attacks on the working class

Reviews — Second World War fiction 48

Letters — Stalinism and Revolution 50

Afterword — Arthur Trusscott, Riots: Fish Rot From the Head 51

New Interventions is indexed at the Alternative Press Centre, website www.altpress.org, e-mail [email protected]

Editorial Board: Mike Belbin, Paul Flewers, Chris Gray, Mike Jones, John Plant, Alan Spence, Dave Spencer

Subscriptions: £10 for four issues, £18.00 for eight issues, unwaged half price, institutions and abroad £15 for four issues, £25 for eight issues. Cheques to be made payable to New Interventions.

The views expressed in articles, reviews and letters in New Interventions represent those of the

author or authors, and may not coincide with those of members of the Editorial Board.

ISSN 1464-6757, 116 Hugh Road, Coventry CV3 1AF, United Kingdom

E-mail: [email protected] (editorial), [email protected] (business)


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Theodor Bergmann

The Tragedy of Paul Levi A German Revolutionary Between Communism and

Social Democracy

This article first appeared in Utopie kreativ (Berlin), no 105, March 2006, pp 247-56, and has been translated by Mike Jones. A collection of many of Levi’s key writings, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg, is due to be published by Brill as part of its Historical Materialism series.

* * *

From the parties hatred and affection storm around him, his character-image fluctuates in history. —

Schiller, Wallenstein

The Communists do him an injustice by calling him a renegade, as do the Social Democrats by calling

him a convert. He was an international revolution-ary Socialist of the Rosa Luxemburg school, he never

denied it. — Carl von Ossietzky

AUL Levi was ignored for a long time, almost forgotten, the object of little Marxist research. In recent times a

warm interest has emerged once more about this great rev-olutionary. Now, however, the fronts are reversed, and the two main currents of the German labour movement want to claim him for themselves. Here I will attempt to sketch out another portrayal that will do him better justice, although I am completely aware of my subjectivity.

Levi and the German Communist Party

The controversy around Paul Levi and the German Com-munist Party (KPD), of which he was the undisputed chairman until 1921, begins with the March Action of that year. With the ‘Theory of the Offensive’, August Thalheimer made a theoretical error that was supposed to serve as a justification for the unsuccessful March Action. Levi’s pub-lic disavowal of the theory was considered a breach of dis-cipline and forgoing of solidarity in a dangerous time. In her Memories of Lenin, Clara Zetkin relates how she argued with Lenin to keep him in the Communist movement, which — as Lenin wittily remarked — did not have many heads to lose.1 The Zentralausschuss of the KPD expelled him — with only two votes opposed: Clara Zetkin and Hans Tittel. Both remained in the KPD, while some important officials — Ernst Däumig, Otto Brass, Adolph Hoffmann — joined him in setting up the Kommunistische Arbeitsge-meinschaft (KAG — Communist Working Group), and they soon published their own journal, Unser Weg.

The strategic error — Thalheimer’s ‘Theory of the Of-

1. Clara Zetkin, Erinnerungen an Lenin (Berlin, 1957).

fensive’ — was criticised and corrected in an intensive dis-cussion with Lenin in Moscow. In a remarkable letter (writ-ten in German), Lenin apologised the following day for his rudeness. Thalheimer evaluated Levi’s accomplishments for the KPD in the Rote Fahne: ‘… an old comrade in arms… we have endured many difficult times together. None of us can rejoice when it concerns a man overboard. He was a leader of manifold, elevated and brilliant talents, from whom the party is separating itself.’

The ‘Theory of the Offensive’ and Levi’s expulsion are only explicable in historical context, as they were politically very closely connected. It concerned the longstanding atti-tudes of the discipline of conviction; and there were parallel interests: the Communists in the Soviet Union and in Ger-many both wanted a revolution. His views regarding the sovereignty of the KPD, of which Moscow’s emissaries — whom he called the ‘Turkestanis’ — were quite dismissive, were shared by the other KPD leaders.2

Back to the Social Democratic Party

Soon afterwards Levi and his friends in the KAG joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), whose left wing had fused with the KPD in the autumn of 1920. In 1922, at its Nuremberg Congress, almost all of the Inde-pendents entered the Social Democratic Party (SPD): Levi may not have felt happy in the party of Noske, Ebert & Co. He explained his step by saying ‘that the working class sees the Social Democratic Party as its party’. As the SPD’s lead-ership remained the same during this time, the fusion was therefore no unification of equal partners but ensued un-conditionally, Levi may have had his doubts from the be-ginning. He stated that he had returned as a representative of the radical left in the party, just as he had left it in the World War. But nobody steps into the same river twice. The SPD leadership had developed further since 1914 — into a known quantity. The party machine treated him as an outsider and let him clearly feel that. The left-wing con-stituency of Chemnitz-Zwickau nominated him for the Reichstag — contrary to the wishes of the party machine. He was successful and he remained a Reichstag deputy un-til his death.

After his expulsion from the KPD Levi did something which enraged the other pupils of Luxemburg. In 1918, he had dissuaded Luxemburg from publishing her critique of the Russian Revolution. Now he published the essay and

2. In a letter of 19 February 1922, Zetkin, Walcher and Brandler

complained about Moscow’s tutelary strivings.

P


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used it, so to speak, against the KPD. The important points of Luxemburg’s criticism, still relevant today, were shared by all her adherents,3 but nearly all of them considered that it was inadmissible publicly to criticise the Bolsheviks whilst they battled against a world of enemies — an atti-tude that is rarely encountered today.

Levi’s explanation for his difficult passage into the SPD reveals that he thought along the lines of the stereotype that very frequently cropped up in the German working class with its proud organisations: unity gives strength. But the SPD’s policies were not class conscious and Levi’s now continuous criticisms of them remained ineffective. And unity only gives strength with a correct policy.

Levi was isolated at the party congresses, which were dominated and manipulated by the apparatchiks. The SPD was no more democratic than the KPD, in which until late 1923 a great deal of discussion took place. In the Reichstag the group leadership usually prevented him from speaking, as it determined how much time its deputies had in which to speak. Of the ‘Unification Congress’ in Nuremberg in 1922, he said:

The proceedings were somewhat wooden, icy, the atmosphere was hostile… The opposition could only express its ideas disjointedly in contributions to the debates, and when one of the ‘opposition’ spoke a large section of the delegates — we do not say all of them — had the stony mask of the Grand Inquisitor on their faces. Almost akin to a pogrom atmosphere. And compared with this, the speakers of the party leadership had abundant opportunities to speak: in the reports as much as double the time agreed in standing orders, in the summing-up as long as they pleased. And intellectually they were all cut from the same cloth.

On many important questions he kept up his criticism. That was the case, for example, regarding the internal con-dition of the party. In his journal he published very critical voices concerning the ‘disregard for party democracy’, ‘a clique which directs an administration in the party that violated freedom of opinion’, the ‘manipulated, censored electoral lists’, the ‘party police’. So he was obliged to pre-sent his criticism through the mouths of letter-writers. Evi-dently he was later restrained from publishing any more voices of that kind.

He opposed the coalition policy of the SPD wholly in the sense of Luxemburg:

Coalitions, existing and anticipated, have their bal-ance sheet, whose assets are often revealed to us. They are meagre enough even in a favourable presentation. The left-hand side, however, has both candid and secret entries. The secret entries repre-sent the abandonment of the hopes expressed in the candid entries, which never come to fruition. It will soon be time to check coalitions and expectations of coalitions from this point of view.

Here too he was still a pupil of Luxemburg. How relevant is this statement considering the neo-liberal capital-offensive

3. See the letter from Leo Jogiches to Sonja Liebknecht in Feliks Tych and Ottokar Luban, ‘Die Spartakusführung zur Politik der

Bolschewiki’, IWK, Volume 33, no 1, 1997, pp 92-102.

of today’s ‘red-green’ coalition; which is neither red nor green, but simply pro-capitalist.4

Exposing the Right-Wingers

Levi’s criticism of the Federal Execution of 1923, as the Fed-eral President Friedrich Ebert sent the Reichswehr into Saxony and Thuringia, in order to depose the legal SPD–KPD coalition governments, was even sharper. Nothing happened regarding the counter-revolutionary putsch in Munich5 at the same time:

What was destroyed in recent weeks will not be able to be rebuilt again for months, indeed perhaps for years. And the worst is that nothing was lost in open struggle with reaction, but that it was wrested from the republic and its red heart, the working class, without the latter defending itself. The republic con-tinually undertakes putsches against itself, it has carried out the splendid putsch against itself just now in Saxony. It will shortly do it in Thuringia.

The counter-revolution develops in Germany ac-cording to plan; it doesn’t even need to get its fin-gers dirty, that is taken care of by others on its be-half. It doesn’t even need to increase its power; be-cause the republic sees to it that thousands of its adherents desert it daily, with rage, pain and disgust over these occurrences, and they become apathetic and indifferent. So the reaction grows to the extent that the republic castigates itself, commits hara-kiri, one suicide after another.

What is more, the republic kills its children, lets them go under in their desperation, or, like the Sax-on workers, to be shot down, as if hungry proletari-ans were the sole enemy of the country: 23 dead on the Saturday just in Freiberg, over 30 seriously wounded in the hospitals moaning with pain. Eve-ryone suffering, on account of this leadership, des-pairing proletarians with the yearning for better days, dead as a result of a deliberate act, shot or crippled. And no mourning, not even a rousing pro-test in this country, which seems to lie in its death throes, even despairing about its future and hence like a madman proceeds to boast in public about its terrible deeds. Is German law only violated when the ‘national foe’ spills German blood, is it only a day of mourning if Germans are shot by the French? Are there only parliamentary manifestations and peals of bells when Germans die in Essen on the Ruhr at French hands? Is the blood shed by the Saxon work-ers caused by German action worth any less than that shed on Good Friday in the Rhineland as a re-sult of French action? Incompetence and cynicism are the characteristics of this republic blessed by the chancellorship of Stresemann.

What is taking place in Saxony has only one precedent: Belgium during the war. Did we not suc-ceed in conquering the enemy in the World War and defeating Poincaré on the Ruhr: there must he victory, and if it is then it is a bloody victory over

4. A reference to the coalition government in Germany at the time of the writing of this article. Composed of Social Demo-crats and Greens, it lasted from 1998 to 2005.

5. That is, Hitler’s ‘Beer Hall Putsch’.


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the Saxon proletariat. Yet with this victory this re-public will die; just as imperial Germany died with its ‘victories’ in the World War.

Levi attentively followed the dismantling of bourgeois de-mocracy under the mendacious formula of the law for the protection of the republic from 1922, which supposedly should have been employed against right-wing extremism. As, however, the state apparatus, particularly its legal sec-tor, had not been purged after 1918, he rightly assumed that the law would be mainly employed against the left, alt-hough everything indicated that the enemy of the republic was on the right:

I recall the judicial farce on the occasion of the Arco case6 where this judicial farce was played out not just inside the court; but outside too, where the stu-dents demonstrated on behalf of Eisner’s7 murderer, and the Bavarian government, in a festive spirit, granted a pardon to Eisner’s killer. It has become the cultivation of the mentality of murders, the cul-tivation on the part of the authorities. [Shout from the Communists: And Pöhner8 is back again as a judge!] Yes, Pöhner is a judge again, the same Pöh-ner who calmly tolerated for years in Munich, the same place from whence the murderer of Erzberger had been sent, how Arco was celebrated as the na-tional hero in poems, postcards, posters on walls and pillars. Mr von Pöhner didn’t want to see any-thing and has seen nothing.

In that context, I would like to ask a further question of the federal government, which is not represented here today. How do things stand there-with? The superficial view of the judicial prosecu-tion associated with the murder of Erzberger9 still gives the impression that something or another is unsafe here. As far as I am aware, the Baden authori-ties — I believe it was on 2 September — arrived in Munich at 11 o’clock in the morning; and at eight o’clock the murderers were brought to the station.

I would like therefore the federal government to reply to the question, whether they have directed their attention to the point that undoubtedly a con-nection existed here between the murderers and

6. Count Arco-Valley (1897-1945) was an officer. Condemned to death for the killing of Eisner (qv), his sentence was commuted

to life imprisonment, and suspended in 1924. 7. Kurt Eisner (1867-1919) was a USPD member and Prime Minis-

ter of Bavaria during 1918-19.

8. Ernst Pöhner (1870-1925) was the Munich police chief in the early 1920s, and was accused across the left of favouring the right. He gave support to the Organisation Consul, a Freikorps

death squad (see note 9). In 1923 he was the Justice Minister in the Bavarian government. In his Putsch in November 1923, Hit-ler had Pöhner marked down as a Prime Minister of Bavaria,

and he was condemned to five years’ jail in the ensuing trial of Hitler and his plotters.

9. Matthias Erzberger (1875-1921) was a prominent member of the

Centre Party and a Reichstag deputy. He signed the armistice with France in November 1918. This led to his being branded by the far right as a ‘traitor’, and he was murdered by the Organi-

sation Consul. The organiser of his murder, Manfred von Kill-inger, also arranged the murder of the German Foreign Minis-ter Walter Rathenau in 1922, and became a prominent official

under the Nazi regime.

their associates on one side and certain circles in Munich on the other, who were made aware of the arrival of the Baden authorities, or, to be blunt, the only place which was informed about it was the headquarters of the Munich police under the leader-ship of Mr Pöhner. [Very true, from the Com-munists.]

Where I now, as I believe, have shown that pro-found and intrinsic relationships exist between the murderers and the milieu from whence they came, and the structure and the extrinsic organisation of the German republic, then it is indeed to set the fox to keep the geese when one now, for the defence of this republic, appeals once more to German official-dom and the laws of the republic, which are execut-ed by those who hitherto, knowingly or unknowing-ly — that may be quite indeterminate — have been with the accomplices of the illustrious people who carried out the murder.

Levi’s criticism of the class-based justice was caustic, when in the Reichstag he denounced ‘the moral depravity of German justice, which cherished and protected murder in Germany’. With his political foresight, Levi saw the danger posed by the SPD, due to its policies aimed against the Communists, which were taking an axe to the roots of the bourgeois republic and abetting the demagogy of the fas-cists, even if by accident:

The profound convulsion of the social structure by the war and postwar events is only now entering the consciousness of those affected by it… They have no faith in this republic… To them the republic is al-most identical with the cause of their suffering. And in order to complete the misery, this republic has been identified with socialism to such a large degree that on the day when the masses ought to turn to us, those who are distant from and hostile towards us, socialism is powerless to attract them, offering them no confidence, dispensing no hope, and prom-ising no happiness… This vast stratum of the des-pairing and only recently disinherited are the social foundation that furnished the rallying position for the putsch named after Hitler, which the one named after Kapp didn’t have.

The struggle against the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht remained one of Levi’s main concerns, and he repeatedly expounded on the subject in the Reichstag and before the Leipzig supreme court. One of his targets was the supreme court judge Paul Jorns, who had from the out-set protected, aided and abetted, and freed the murderers. Against the latter he won a moral victory for which he was congratulated by Albert Einstein:

Dear Paul Levi. It is elevating to see how, by a love of justice and acumen, an isolated person without support has cleansed the atmosphere, a wonderful pendant to Zola. In the finest among us Jews there still lives something of the social justice of the Old Testament.

Levi and the Soviet Union

Levi’s criticism of the Soviet Union was guided by the good


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intention of understanding its problems; it differed both in form and content from the anti-Communism which domi-nated the SPD’s press, even if there were sympathies for the Soviet Union at the rank-and-file level. His criticism be-came gradually sharper, and he surely erred when, for ex-ample, in 1924 he raised the question of the Soviet Union adopting an imperialist orientation:

One thing is certain. The powerful economic ener-gies of the country, once developed, will give the na-tionalism of its inhabitants a legitimate foundation, and then for Europe and the world a bloody chapter of imperialism will begin.

This criticism was already being presented by the beginning of the Stalin era, but there is no doubt that at this time So-viet foreign policy was purely defensive, and in no way im-perialist in character. (And also in regard to later periods the characterisation of ‘imperialism’ would seem to be ob-jectively false.) It is no doubt true that Levi’s attitude to-wards the Soviet Union changed over time, as Uli Schöler has demonstrated.10

Levi rejected the New Economic Policy, just as he re-jected Lenin’s agrarian policy. A detailed discussion of the agrarian question and its significance both in revolution and the construction of a socialist society is out of place here. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a misunderstanding of Russian economic problems on his part is discernible, although in the mid-1920s there was no experience yet in the field of socialist construction, and no comparison could thus be made. The warning of Bukharin and later of Trotsky about an exorbitant demand on the peasantry through ex-acting too high a ‘tribute’ via the terms of trade seems sen-sible to me. On the other hand, Preobrazhensky’s demand for a high contribution from the agrarian sector towards the construction of industry was mistaken.

Levi directed his energies vehemently against German rearmament, on account of which in 1931 a split took place in the SPD. Levi would surely have been the appropriate leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SAP).11

Levi’s Critics

Levi remained unpopular with the mighty of the SPD. It had been so when he was still a KPD official. Vorwärts wrote at the time: ‘A certain Levi and the loud-mouthed Rosa Luxemburg, neither of whom ever stood at the vice or in the workshop, are close to ruining everything we and our fathers conquered.’12

This hostility remained unchanged when Levi returned to the SPD. Schöler’s attempt to interpret Levi and Luxem-burg’s differences with Lenin as an antithesis seems to me therefore to be historically dishonest. In 1930, Thalheimer described the distinction between Luxemburg and Lenin quite differently. He believed their aims were the same — the defence of the Russian revolution, a revolution in Ger-many — but their methods and organisational principles

10. Uli Schöler, ‘Der unbekannte Paul Levi’, Utopie kreativ, no 165-166, July-August 2004, pp 737-51.

11. The Socialist Workers Party (SAP) was formed in October 1931

after the SPD expelled several left-wing Reichstag deputies in-cluding Kurt Rosenfeld and Max Seydewitz.

12. Cited in Charlotte Beradt, Paul Levi: Ein demokratischer Sozi-

alist in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/Main, 1969) , p 22.

had to be different, since the movements in which they operated and the circumstances of their political activity were wholly different. The Bolsheviks operated in an agrar-ian country in harsh illegality, thus their organisation was illegal and persecuted, and hence required professional revolutionaries. Rosa Luxemburg operated in Germany, a country with a strong, growing industrial working class, who were no longer illiterate, and who possessed formally democratic, legal organisations. The hard, continuous class struggle was conducted mostly in legal forms, even if this legality had to be vigorously fought for. The Russian prole-tariat was still a class in itself, in statu nascendi; the German was, on the other hand, already a class for itself, educated by auto-didactic workers’ leaders — the turner August Be-bel, the chimney-sweep Friedrich Westmeyer, the bricklay-er Heinrich Brandler, the metalworker Jacob Walcher, to name just a few.13

Following Levi’s death on 9 February 1930, there was a shameful scene in the Reichstag. That the NSDAP deputies withdrew during the commemorative words is understand-able, as this honours Paul Levi, the courageous opponent of German reaction. But the KPD deputies did the same. Many obituaries did him justice. Albert Einstein wrote thus: ‘He was one of the most upright, wittiest and bravest people whom I have encountered on my journey through life… One of those who act naturally from the inner compulsion of an insatiable necessity for justice.’

In a very humane obituary in Gegen den Strom, Thal-heimer said:

I first met him in the summer of 1918… He was prominently involved in the preparations for No-vember… He was a brilliant contributor to the Rote Fahne under Rosa Luxemburg’s editorial control. At the same time he made his appearance as an public speaker at mass gatherings… Following the deaths of Rosa and Karl he was the actual leader of the party… If he, as Lenin openly declared, was 90 per cent cor-rect with his criticism of the March Action of 1921, if he could easily have been able to prevail with organ-ised, disciplined, patient steps, then he ruined eve-rything by acting in the opposite manner… Com-munism, to which Levi once belonged, has no rea-son still to accuse Paul Levi beyond his death. The working class can clearly and impartially separate the bright past, when he served Communism, from the later times.14

That was the tone and the manner that earlier had been customary and normal among revolutionaries.

In her obituary, Bertha Thalheimer, August’s sister and co-founder of the Spartakusbund, was not so friendly. She admitted that he had indeed been right in his criticism of the March Action, but thought that he should have ‘tolerat-ed the historical injustice of his expulsion, in spite of the acknowledged correctness of his criticism, in the interest of the construction of the Communist Party and the Interna-

13. August Thalheimer, ‘Rosa Luxemburg oder Lenin?’, Gegen den

Strom, Volume 3, no 2, 1930, pp 21-22 (translation: ‘Rosa Lux-emburg or Lenin?’, What Next?, no 7, 1998, pp 38-41).

14. August Thalheimer, ‘Paul Levi’, Gegen den Strom, Volume 3, no

7, 1930, pp 103-04.


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tional’.15 Perhaps this obituary was aimed more at her own comrades in the KPD-O; in order to exhort them to contin-ue with their difficult struggle. In 1928, both the Thal-heimers acted otherwise; but the condition of the KPD in 1928 was probably wholly different to 1921: critics could no longer even hope to be heard. The time of debates was over: the general line of Stalin should no longer be doubted.

This situation lasted until the end of 1983, when the So-cialist Unity Party of East Germany finally honoured Paul Levi. During a festive arrangement on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the KPD, Horst Sindermann, a Politbureau member, stated:

Such prominent fighters of the German labour movement as Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Pieck, Hermann Duncker and Käte Duncker, Hugo Eber-lein and Paul Frölich, Leo Jogiches and Ernst Meyer, August Thalheimer, Paul Levi and Paul Lange, were delegates [to the founding congress].

Before the relentless polemics began, Lenin expressed him-self extraordinarily appreciatively about Levi in a conversa-tion with Clara Zetkin: ‘You know how highly I valued Paul Levi. I got to know him in Switzerland and held out hopes for him. He has proved himself in the time of the worst persecution, he was brave, wise and dedicated.’16

Against the ‘Professional Revolutionary’

In conclusion I would like in addition to express some gen-eral thoughts about Paul Levi.

Politics not as a profession but as a contribution. The most intensive activity in the socialist movement was a necessity of life for Paul Levi. But he wanted both inwardly and externally to be independent, not to live off politics, but for it. He under-stood that in Russia the conditions had necessitated the pro-fessional revolutionary, he opposed this for the German movement (and for himself). In 1926 he wrote thus:

One of the many transfers from Russian conditions into Western European ones, and German ones in particular, is the creation of the professional revolu-tionary… a Russian phenomenon surely in its psy-chic prerequisites, certainly in its political. In Ger-many out of the professional revolutionary with fire in the belly, hunger, self-sacrifice, has emerged the resignation of the revolutionary functionary. The professional revolutionary has in fact nothing… but he does have his political opinion. In the KPD, how-ever, there are men who are professional revolution-aries; men who have understood how to remain in their posts, since they have no opinion.17

Levi and the Jewish Question

An early anti-Semitic leaflet in late 1918 said: ‘The Jew has seized the crown. We are governed by Levi and Rosa Lux-emburg.’18

15. The obituary is quoted more fully in Theodor Bergmann, Wolfgang Haible and Galina Ivanova, Die Geschwister Thal-heimer: Skizzen ihrer Leben und Politik (Mainz, 1993), pp 76-77.

16. Cited in Otfrid Arnold, Paul Levi: Sozialdemokrat — KPD-Vorsitzender — Sozialdemokrat (Berlin, 1996), p 16.

17. Sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft, 15 August 1926.

18. Cited in Beradt, Paul Levi, p 22.

In the socialist movement anti-Semitism was taboo, with rare exceptions, such as perhaps Wilhelm Keil in Stuttgart.19 Jewish workers and intellectuals, occasionally a far-sighted industrialist, too, belonged to the labour move-ment in Germany, without their Jewishness seeming in any way remarkable, like Paul Singer and Hugo Haase, who were elected to the SPD leadership. For these Jewish social-ists and revolutionaries, in spite of the latent and often very open anti-Semitism, there was no ‘Jewish Question’.

For German Jews at that time — long before Auschwitz — there were three routes: 1. Assimilation, in many cases even as far as formal con-

version — parents allowed their children to be bap-tised.

2. Zionism, the movement which aspired to emigration and eventually the establishment of a state in Palestine — a small minority at the time.

3. The belief that a socialist society would resolve all na-tional questions in the spirit of internationalism, among them the Jewish question too. We socialists have still to honour this claim.

That was before Auschwitz, before the most horrific crimes of German fascism, the reign of terror of the German bour-geoisie, which nobody, not even the most far-sighted Marx-ists, could imagine. After Auschwitz, the Jewish Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher wrote:

Naturally, I repudiated my anti-Zionism long ago, which was based on my trust in the European labour movement, or — more generally — on my trust in European society and civilisation, because this society and this civilisation have given the lie to that. If in the 1920s and 1930s I had called upon the European Jews to go to Palestine instead of opposing Zionism, I might have helped to save a few human lives which later were annihilated in Hitler’s gas chambers. For the remnants of Euro-pean Jewry — really only for them? — the Jewish state has become an historical necessity. Further-more, it is a living reality… Nevertheless, today I am no Zionist.20

Anti-communist historians criticise not only the active par-ticipation of Jews in the struggles of the working class; in their narrow-mindedness they actually saw Marxism and the proletarian movement as a Jewish invention, as part of the Jews’ supposed quest for world domination. For Marxist historians, however, another question poses itself. How did it come about that relatively many Jews became revolution-aries or progressive thinkers of modern development and ideas and made their contribution on many fronts of the international class struggle, risking their lives? Deutscher the Marxist answered this with another statement which seems obvious to me:

Have they perhaps influenced human thought so decisively on account of their ‘Jewish genius’? I do not believe in the unique ingeniousness of any par-ticular race. But I do believe though that in many re-

19. Wilhelm Keil (1870-1968) was an SPD newspaper editor, longstanding Reichstag deputy and member of the South-West German parliament both before 1933 and after 1945.

20. Isaac Deutscher, Der Nicht-judische Jude (Berlin, 1988).


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spects they were very Jewish… They were a priori ex-traordinary, inasmuch as they as Jews had lived on the margins between different civilisations, religions and national cultures, and are born and grew up on the margin between different epochs… They lived in the border areas or in the cracks and folds of their respective nation… This condition has enabled them to elevate themselves in their thinking above their society, above their time and generation, to open up new intellectual horizons and push forward far into the future.21

In the same essay, concerning the radical Jewish thinkers, he says:

All these thinkers and revolutionaries have had cer-tain philosophical principles in common… They are all determinists therefore, since they have observed many societies, have studied many life-forms at close-hand, and thence also grasped the fundamen-tal laws of life… They understood reality as some-thing dynamic. Finally, all of them, from Spinoza through Marx up to Freud, had believed in the ulti-mate solidarity of man… In their hearts these ‘non-Jewish Jews’ were always optimists, and their opti-mism reached a height which is difficult to attain nowadays. They could not have imagined that ‘civi-lised’ Europe could sink so deep into barbarism in the twentieth century.22

So Jews have understood their persecution and prejudice against them as part of the far-reaching oppression and from the outset have fought alongside their comrades in the socialist movement, and also done their bit on all fronts in the struggle against German fascism. One of their great intellects was Paul Levi.

Levi the Luxemburgist

Heinrich Winkler called Levi an ‘intrigant inside the SPD’;23 Schölar claimed him as a ‘left social democrat of the 1920s’.24 I’m inclined to doubt that Levi became a social democrat. He would rather seem to have experienced that the SPD apparatus determined the party’s politics, and even the strong opposition exercised no influence upon it. Of course, he was strong and free enough to express bluntly his non-social-democratic opinion, although scarcely through the official channels and in the publications of ‘his’ party. Nevertheless, I do not want to go as far as Heinz Niemann, who thinks that objectively ‘he helped the re-formists to maintain their influence’.25

Yet at times he seems to have hoped that the division of the German labour movement could be overcome once more by means of and within the SPD. To me that seems unhistorical; the organisational splits in 1914 and 1918 was necessary; the political divisions inevitably led to it. The

21. Ibid. 22. Ibid.

23. Heinrich Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung. Ar-beiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin/Bonn, 1985).

24. Uli Schöler, ‘Der unbekannte Paul Levi’, Utopie kreativ, no 165-166, July-August 2004, pp 737-51.

25. Heinz Niemann, ‘Paul Levi in unserer Zeit’, Geschichtskorre-

spondenz, Volume 10, no 1, 2004.

furious anti-communism of the SPD leadership, the politi-cal actions of Otto Hörsing, Carl Severing, Karl Zörgiebel and others had contributed their share to the deepening of the split. As long as different conceptions about the road to socialism exist, more than one proletarian party is neces-sary. The necessary unity in the day-to-day class struggle must be created by the united front, not by a united party of reformists and revolutionaries.

Charles Bloch has, it seems to me, summed up Levi’s principles.26 Levi always stuck to three principles: 1. Bourgeois society can be replaced by socialism only by

way of a revolution. The bearer of this revolution must be the proletariat, even if it is in alliance with other classes.

2. In order to attain its goal the working class must be united; this unity can only rest on the basis of complete conceptual clarity.

3. Free debate and internal democracy must always exist within the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat also must preserve a certain degree of freedom. In the long term, democracy and socialism are inseparable. They mutually supplement and deepen each other, and on-ly with this unity can the needs of the masses be satis-fied.

Above I quoted from Ossietzky, who believed that both the SPD and the KPD would label Paul Levi, following his death, as their opponent; and so it was too. In 2004 it is the reverse. In a copy of Disput, Heinz Niemann and Jörn Schütrumpf claim Levi for the PDS,27 while the social democrat Uli Schöler claims him for the social demo-crats.28

Levi was perhaps no great theoretician of Marxism; but he had absorbed it and in his political analyses and in his party activity he was a master in applying it.

Since 1924, when Ruth Fischer uttered her nasty lump-en-proletarian words about Rosa Luxemburg, and up to the death of Fred Oelssner and the demise of the SED, Luxem-burgism was regarded as one of the greatest political sins of the German labour movement. Paul Levi would have been proud to be characterised as a Luxemburgist. His expulsion from the young KPD did not change him politically; he remained one of her most faithful pupils. However, for the KPD this decision was an early mistake and led to a great loss.

26. Charles Bloch, ‘Paul Levi: Ein Symbol der Tragödie des Linkssozialismus in der Weimarer Republik’, in Walter and Jul-ius H Schoeps (eds), Juden in der Weimarer Republik

(Stuttgart/Bonn, 1986), pp 244-61. 27. See also Heinz Niemann, ‘Paul Levi in unserer Zeit’, Ges-

chichtskorrespondenz, Volume 10, no 1, 2004; Jörn Schütrumpf,

‘Unabgoltenes Politikverständnis bei Paul Levi’, Utopie kreativ, no 150, April 2003, pp 330-42.

28. Uli Schöler, ‘Der unbekannte Paul Levi’, Utopie kreativ, no 165-

166, July-August 2004, pp 737-51.


9

Mike Jones and Alistair Mitchell

Isaac Deutscher

SAAC Deutscher was born in 1907 in Kraków in Austrian Poland, at the corner where the three empires met. In an

interview by Hamburg Television, Deutscher spoke of his childhood in this region where, as Jews and Poles, they lived among Czechs and Hungarians. His father was an orthodox Jew, in love with German culture, philosophy and poetry, and he tried to pass his views on to Isaac, who re-sisted his father’s wishes. Going to both a Polish school, with its strong Catholicism, and a rabbinical school, to be trained for the career of a rabbi, Isaac rejected both ortho-doxies and became an atheist. His then hostility to things German owed itself to his Polish patriotism. It would be Marxism and the works of its greatest exponents which would give him his interest in German literature and phi-losophy, and he tells of his pride when Thomas Mann praised his grasp of his (Mann’s) work during the mid-1920s, after interviewing him in Warsaw.1

Following the collapse of the three monarchies, the es-tablishment of the Soviet regime in Russia, the re-establishment of Poland, and all the consequent upheaval, it was a time of acute social, political and intellectual fer-ment. Isaac left home aged 18 and entered into this ferment in Warsaw. Here he would develop a passion for things Russian, and began his life-long interest in, and study of, the Russian revolution. He also joined the Polish Com-munist Party at this time, also at the age of 18.

In a broadcast on BBC radio marking the centenary of the first publication of Capital in 1967, Deutscher summa-rised his activity thus:

For years I was busy editing literary journals, writing political commentaries, illegal manifestoes and leaf-lets, addressing workers, organising even peasants, conducting as a soldier underground propaganda in Piłsudski’s army, and all the time dodging the gen-darmerie and the political police.2

In 1931, Deutscher visited the Soviet Union on behalf of the Polish Communist Party, and saw at first hand the effects of the forced collectivisation and the beginning of the indus-trialisation.

During 1931-32, an opposition crystallised within the Polish Communist Party, on the basis of a critique of the current wisdom emanating from the Communist Interna-tional and its effects on the party. Sectarian ‘slogans about “social fascism”, the “united front only from below”, etc’,

1. Isaac Deutscher, Interview on Hamburg TV, 23 July 1967, the transcript of which was edited by Deutscher himself and print-ed in New Left Review, January-February 1968, reprinted as

‘Germany and Marxism’, in Tamara Deutscher (ed), Marxism in Our Time (London, 1972), pp 172-74.

2. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Discovering Das Kapital’, Marxism in Our

Time, p 257.

but ‘also… the bureaucratic inner-party regime’, led to it ‘demanding the right of self-determination for the Polish Party’, and taking ‘a critical attitude towards the regime that was prevailing within the International and the Soviet Party’.3 Although not Trotskyist in its origins, the opposi-tion would gravitate towards Trotsky on account of his crit-icism of the situation in the Soviet Union and, particularly, because of his campaign for a united front of the workers’ organisations in Germany against the Nazi threat.

The opposition could count on a not insignificant mi-nority of party members in Warsaw, and a large circle of sympathisers in the party organisations, but was much weaker in the provinces. As by this time the party itself had become isolated from the working class and was largely restricted to a petit-bourgeois fringe, this fate also befell the opposition. Deutscher was charged with exaggerating the danger from Nazism and with spreading panic within the workers’ movement, as a result of his authorship of the text ‘The Danger of a New Barbarism in Europe’, which resulted in his expulsion from the party in June 1932.

The ups and downs of that movement do not concern us here. Furthermore, according to Deutscher, by denounc-ing it as an agency of ‘social-fascism’, of fascism itself, and as a gang of ‘enemies of the Soviet Union’, the party leaders succeeded in gradually isolating it from its membership, so that by 1936 it had almost no contact with it.4 Deutscher’s capacity for independent thought led him to challenge Trotsky in 1934, over his characterisation of the Piłsudski regime as fascist. He analysed it convincingly as a form of ‘pseudo-Bonapartism’. In August 1936, he wrote The Mos-cow Trial, a pamphlet denouncing and exposing the show trial then underway, situating it in its international frame-work. It was published in Światło, a legal journal of the Polish Socialist Party. Introducing this text to English read-ers almost 50 years later, Tamara, Isaac’s widow, writes: ‘One can feel that Isaac’s hand had been trembling with rage.’ She relates that when in Rome during the Easter of 1959, Isaac was called to the bedside of the dying Stefan Kurowski, former President of the Polish Supreme Court. Kurowski, a founder member of the Polish Communist Par-ty, told him that he had been right in 1932, at the time of his expulsion, and that he had wanted to tell him this for a long time. Moreover, Kurowski told him that a few months before, his last act as President of the Supreme Court had

3. Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party’,

Marxism in Our Time, p 153. 4. Ibid. For a picture of this period see the account by Ludwik

Hass in Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no 1, 1990, of the op-

position within the Polish Communist Party up to 1945. Hass refers to the memoirs of Hersh Mendel, Erinnerungen eines jüdischen Revolutionärs (Berlin, 1979), for a description of the

period.

I


10

been to quash the sentences of 10 years in prison and to release a group of people who, in 1948, had reprinted the 1936 pamphlet. The Deutschers sought it but never found it again, until a young man from Oxford studying in Warsaw University Library came across it, marked ‘not to be re-moved’. He transcribed it by hand and passed it on to Tamara in the spring of 1965.5 When Trotsky insisted on founding a Fourth International in 1938 out of small groups of isolated militants, after catastrophic defeats for the workers’ movement, the Polish organisation voted to op-pose the decision. The two delegates who attended the gathering presented the arguments drafted by Deutscher. Such independence of thought earned Deutscher the hostil-ity of the most wooden-brained Trotskyists, an hostility that still endures. The Polish organisation, though sceptical about Trotsky’s new International, decided to go along with it once it had been founded. Deutscher left the organisation with a minority.

In April 1939, Deutscher left Warsaw for England by way of Paris. In the summer of 1939, Sam Bornstein, a Brit-ish Trotskyist, met him at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. The following Sunday Bornstein introduced him to Jock Haston, a leading figure in one of the Trotskyist groupings. Because of Deutscher’s poor grasp of English, they only exchanged a few words. By the autumn of 1939, it must have improved immensely as he was contributing a regular commentary on international political affairs, ‘From a Marxist Notebook’, in Workers Fight, the organ of another Trotskyist grouping, the Revolutionary Workers League, under the name of Jósef Bren. At the same time he began supporting himself as a journalist, submitting articles to The Economist, starting with one on Marx and Capital. Af-ter the RWL broke up, he volunteered for the Polish armed forces being organised in Britain and enlisted as a corporal.6 Whatever he hoped to achieve there is not clear, and any-way his soldiering did not last long. He spent much of it locked up in the guard-house. Anti-Semitism and anti-communist ideas were widespread, hardly the best place for a man of Isaac’s background and outlook. His view on the war can be judged from the article ‘The Angels and the Devil’, in Workers Fight, no 5, May 1940, in which he ex-pounds a Marxist analysis.7

5. See Tamara Deutscher’s introduction, Tamara Deutscher (ed), Marxism, Wars and Revolutions (London, 1984), pp xxii-xxiii

6. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International: A

History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937-1949 (Lon-don, 1986), p 39. Bornstein and Richardson, in researching their two volumes on British Trotskyism, of which the above is

the second, discovered Deutscher’s party pseudonym and the name which he used to append to his commentaries. Tamara Deutscher apparently knew no details of this and enquired of

Richardson with a view to publishing these unknown texts by Deutscher. Richardson informed us that Deutscher had a commentary in Workers Fight from the autumn of 1939 until

the spring of 1940. One of Bornstein and Richardson’s sources remembers being introduced to Deutscher ‘about October 1940’, at the home of one of the RWL leaders (ibid, p 50, n 97).

7. Ibid, p 50, n 97: ‘… this is not a war between democratic angels and fascist devils, nor is it a war for the rights of small nations, but exclusively a war for profits, waged by trusts and cartels, at

the expense of the workers of all countries.’ The authors use the quote to refute a view that Deutscher adopted a Com-munist Party-style attitude to the war — democracy contra

fascism — pointing out that it was written as both sides were

From now on Deutscher put his main energy into work-ing on his classic biographies, sustaining himself with polit-ical journalism. As he admitted to Hamburg Television, he was only now to come under the influence of the great Eng-lish historians, after learning English, and finally finding his ‘world language’.8 The young man whom his father hoped would follow in the footsteps of Goethe, who then chose Mickiewicz instead, and had a reputation as a poet in his youth, ended up compared with the best writers and histo-rians in the English language.

Introducing a selection of the correspondence between Deutscher and Heinrich Brandler, who reached London in 1947, returning from Cuba, and was to strike up a relation-ship with the Deutschers, Tamara recalls their talks late into the night and how ‘a cordial bond of mutual respect, admiration and affection’ developed between the two men.9 One can read this in Brandler’s letter of condolences upon Isaac’s death on 19 August 1967, as well as in Tamara’s reply to Brandler of 31 August. The letters between the two men discussing both historical and contemporary issues, illus-trate just what impressive figures they were. In spite of originally different political standpoints, there is anyway quite an affinity, and when one is erring in one matter, the other pulls him back. One sees the two minds struggling to interpret events both actual and historical.10

From the appearance of his Stalin until his death Deutscher was being attacked by leading spokesmen for the communist parties, the orthodox and unorthodox Trotsky-ist chapels of every persuasion, and the CIA-financed anti-communist institutions. Not long before he died, he was offered a full professorship at one of the key British univer-sities, which could have given him the necessary financial security to work on his Life of Lenin, but it was withdrawn after a sector of the senior tutors protested. To have upset all these worthy ‘experts’, Deutscher must have been saying highly unorthodox things. He did not fit in.

Talks, lectures and speeches to audiences of thousands were given in those years, some were issued later in collec-tions of Deutscher’s essays. His George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University in early 1967 were later published as The Unfinished Revolution, an analytical work which influenced a generation of socialists grappling to understand the evolution of the Soviet Union. Following the split in the Communist Party of Great Britain over the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, a ‘new left’ emerged, and Deutscher encouraged and wrote for them. He intervened when hard-line Stalinists gaoled and slandered Władysław Gomułka, who at the time represented a non-Stalinist tendency in Polish communism. This came to light when he wrote an ‘open letter’ to Go-mułka and the Communist Party Central Committee, pro-testing against the gaoling of Ludwik Hass, Jacek Kuroń, Karol Modzelewski, et al, for issuing Marxist critiques of Polish communism. Deutscher was highly regarded in gen-

violating Norwegian neutrality.

8. Deutscher, ‘Germany and Marxism’, Marxism in Our Time, p 175

9. See Tamara Deutscher’s introduction, Marxism, Wars and

Revolutions, p xxviii. The complete correspondence is pub-lished in Hermann Weber (ed), Unabhängige Kommunisten (Berlin, 1981), only sections exist in an English translation.

10. Weber, op cit.


11

uine communist circles in Poland for his stand in 1932, and for denouncing the dissolution and liquidation of the pre-war Polish Communist Party and its historic leadership. From time to time, however, he would be denounced by the ruling communist parties in the Soviet bloc, and hard-line Stalinists prevented the publication of his works.

When Deutscher opposed the proclamation of Trotsky’s new International, he saw no possibility of its meeting a response in the working class. It was a period of the darkest defeats when Stalinism was demoralising those workers who would have provided a revolutionary vanguard. A new upturn was required. When Deutscher saw the chance of such an upturn, he left his study and pen in order to get personally involved. He was invited to speak to huge stu-dent audiences, and to mass protests against the Vietnam War in the USA. He also denounced the aggressive and chauvinist attitudes manifest in Israel shortly before his death. And this was from a man who had lost his family in Auschwitz. He was still seeing things from a class outlook. Fully in line with his outlook, when Bertrand Russell was seeking people of integrity and independence of thought to take part in his International War Crimes Tribunal, investi-gating the horrific actions of US imperialism against the tiny backward country of Vietnam, Deutscher put down his work in order to participate. Tragically, Deutscher died without completing his work on Lenin, just a slim volume on his childhood appeared. Surely a greater loss was his planned study on Europe since the 1840s. However, Deutscher left us with his written works and his example as an unashamed heretical Marxist, his integrity and inde-pendence of thought intact.

Deutscher’s Writings

Deutscher emerged as a writer of international significance with the publication of his biography of Stalin in 1949. The first edition covered up to 1948, later editions contain a further chapter covering the last five years of Stalin’s rule. The book was noteworthy not only for marking Deutscher’s rise to prominence, but also because it was the first ap-praisal of Stalin’s life which came from an avowed Marxist viewpoint and yet rejected Stalinism. Trotsky had written his own biography of Stalin before Deutscher, but, as will be said later, this was not completed by Trotsky before his death and is more of an indictment of or attack on Stalin than an objective study.

Deutscher’s Stalin appeared after the outbreak of the Cold War which in the field of literature and propaganda was marked by crude writings denouncing the Soviet Union from the one side, and equally crude and dishonest replies from the other. The times hardly encouraged the produc-tion of a scholarly and objective study of Stalin. This makes Deutscher’s achievement all the greater. Writing in a world that was dominated by the forces of imperialism ranged against those of Stalinism, Deutscher’s book sees him take up his position in the ‘watch-tower’, as he put it, to observe and advocate an independent view.

Some idea of the influence enjoyed by Deutscher’s Sta-lin and the responses to it can be gleaned from an amusing extract from Deutscher’s introduction to the 1961 edition, which also serves as testament for its balanced and objec-tive account:

The book has been praised or blamed for the most

contradictory reasons, either as a denunciation of Stalinism, or as an apology for it, and sometimes as both denunciation and apology. Thus, the late Moshe Pijade, Marshal Tito’s friend and associate, once explained to me why the government of which he was a member refused to allow a Yugoslav edi-tion of Stalin: ‘You see’, he said, ‘the trouble with your book is that it is too pro-Soviet for us whenever we quarrel with the Russians; and it is too anti-Soviet whenever we try to be friendly with them.’ (‘In any case’, he added with a twinkle in the eye, ‘we cannot permit a Yugoslav edition to appear be-cause if we did everyone would see at once from what source our great theorists have drawn most of their wisdom.)’11

Deutscher is best known, however, for his three-volume biography of Trotsky. He had originally intended to write a one or two-volume study, but the complexity and scale of the subject forced him to extend the work to a trilogy. The first volume, The Prophet Armed, appeared in 1954, the se-cond, The Prophet Unarmed, in 1959, and the final volume, The Prophet Outcast, was published in 1963. As the titles suggest, the first volume covers the rise of Trotsky to the peak of his powers in 1921. The second details his decline until his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, and the third surveys the final 11 years of Trotsky’s life in exile.

Deutscher’s trilogy restored Trotsky’s rightful place in the history of the Russian revolution. In the years to come, the Stalinist falsifiers, in the capitalist world at least, would have to try and come to terms with Deutscher’s account, on which point he said:

My account of Trotsky’s role in the Russian revolu-tion will come as a surprise to some. For nearly 30 years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalin-ism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky’s name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor… Trotsky’s life story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved with gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace can be found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persis-tent that it has strongly affected the views of even independent Western historians and scholars.12

Nearly 40 years since these words were written, it may, in turn, now seem strange and come as a surprise that Deutscher had to make these points, so changed has the intellectual climate become. Yet his work can be seen as a major part of the process of change itself.

Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy was highly praised by many reviewers when it appeared. Graham Greene wrote in the Observer: ‘The three volumes of Isaac Deutscher’s life of Trotsky… were for me the most exciting reading of the year. Surely this must be counted among the greatest biog-raphies in the English language.’ AJP Taylor was to com-ment in the New Statesman that: ‘He has told the story

11. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (London, 1988), p 11.

12. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (Oxford, 1987), pp v-vi.


12

more accurately and with fuller detail than ever before. His book is compulsory reading for anyone interested in the history of Soviet Russia and of international communism.’ Whilst Leonard Schapiro was to write in the Listener: ‘Mr Deutscher… does full justice to his hero. He tells the story magnificently.’

However, Deutscher does more than counter what Trotsky had called the ‘Stalinist falsification of history’ and restore the leader of the October insurrection and the founder of the Red Army to his rightful place. Deutscher’s trilogy is far from uncritical of Trotsky himself, and just as his Stalin was too ‘anti’ for some and too ‘pro’ for others, so has his Trotsky been received by many readers. If attempt-ing to ‘rehabilitate’ Trotsky marks Deutscher as a ‘heretical communist’ in the eyes of the Stalinist ranks, he is no less a heretic in the view of many in the Trotskyist movement for daring to raise criticisms of their ‘Old Man’.

Deutscher ended the first volume, The Prophet Armed, with a chapter entitled ‘Defeat in Victory’ where he argued that Trotsky’s actions at the height of his powers as victor in the Civil War sowed the seeds of his later defeat. The story is told of how Trotsky operated under War Com-munism, how as a Commissar in the Bolshevik government he supported Lenin in first suppressing opposition parties and then in banning factions even within the Bolshevik Party. This provided some of the foundations on which Stalin later built, and Deutscher explains how by accepting the political monopoly of a monolithic Bolshevik party, Trotsky doomed himself to defeat.

Deutscher resumes the narrative in the second volume covering the years of Trotsky’s fall and the rise of the Stalin-ist machine.

Whilst retaining sympathy and admiration for his sub-ject, Deutscher is far from uncritical, and he challenges some of the myths of the Trotskyist movement. For exam-ple, he shows how the Left Opposition only organised be-tween 4000 and 8000 members out of a total Communist Party membership of 750 000, and he explains how the struggle was confined to the apparatus and involved about 20 000 in total, leaving the mass of the rank-and-file of the proletariat, in whose name the struggle was undertaken, cold.13 Trotsky’s mistakes in the battle and his silence and inactivity at crucial times of controversy over foreign and domestic policy are also shown.

Deutscher intended to follow up his biographies of Sta-lin and Trotsky with one of Lenin. Unfortunately he died before this was completed, and all we have is a fragment telling the story of Lenin’s early years entitled Lenin’s Childhood, which was published after his death,

Although Deutscher is best remembered for his studies of the lives of two of the communist giants of the 1920s, he was far more than a biographer. His prolific output covered themes as diverse as the Cold War, diplomacy, literature, the causes of bureaucratisation, a collection of essays about the Jews, and a wide variety of reviews, studies, corre-spondence and interviews. Amongst the latter his interview entitled The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party and his correspondence with Heinrich Brandler on German com-munism are notable. A number of collections of Deutscher’s essays have appeared since his death.

13. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (Oxford, 1987), pp 274-

75.

However, after his biographies, the single biggest area of Deutscher’s interest and writings was the Soviet Union. Among the volumes where he develops his understanding of Stalinism are Russia After Stalin published in 1953, Here-tics and Renegades in 1955, The Great Contest: Russia and the West in 1960, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967, and Russia, China and the West 1953-1966, which ap-peared posthumously in 1970. No assessment of Deutscher would be complete without at least a brief consideration of his views of the Stalinist states.

Deutscher was often attacked for allegedly providing apologies for the Stalinist regimes. However, the Stalinists themselves took a different view — a leading article in Pravda of 22 August 1968 castigated the Czechoslovakian newspapers who ‘willingly opened their columns to writ-ings of such outright adversaries of Marxism-Leninism’ as Isaac Deutscher. So even a year after his death the Stalinists feared and opposed Deutscher.

Nevertheless, despite his proven anti-Stalinism, there was an undoubted ambiguity in Deutscher’s attitude to-wards the Stalinist bureaucracy. By this we do not mean that he doubted its reactionary essence, rather that he seemed to suggest at times that this bureaucracy might be peacefully put aside. In 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, he wrote:

The economic progress made during the Stalin era at last brought within reach of the people a measure of well-being which should make possible an orderly winding up of Stalinism and a gradual democratic revolution.14

This evolutionist-cum-reformist restoration of Soviet de-mocracy has been confounded by the course of subsequent events. In fact they had largely been confounded in Deutscher’s lifetime, yet he never wholly gave up his hopes for this type of solution. In his last book which was pub-lished before he died, he still said: ‘What seems possible in the near future is that society should be able to retrieve civil liberties and establish political control over the state.’15 What he didn’t face up to was how these civil liberties were to be retrieved, it was not as though they had been acci-dentally mislaid and were just waiting for someone to come along and pick them up, there was the no small matter of the whole repressive apparatus of the bureaucracy to be dealt with.

Deutscher also held to an optimistic view of the evolu-tion of Soviet society in the economic sphere. In his The Great Contest, published in 1960, he predicted that in 10 years’ time, that is to say by 1970, Soviet standards of living would be above Western European levels, that the USSR would achieve economic parity with the United States in the 1960s, and that by 1984 the Soviet working day would be down to ‘not more than four or even three hours’. The economic successes of the Soviet bloc would, he expected, lead to the workers in the West moving towards com-munism.16

It is probable that if he had lived longer Deutscher

14. Isaac Deutscher, Russia in Transition (London, 1969), p 168.

15. Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 (London, 1967), p 107.

16. Isaac Deutscher, The Great Contest: Russia and the West (Lon-

don, 1960), p 80.


13

would have seen that this prognosis was erroneous, and now we, with the advantages of hindsight and the experi-ences of the last few dramatic years, can see how wrong he was. Far from keeping at the high levels of Deutscher’s time, Soviet economic growth rates slowed down and then stagnated. In his Russia After Stalin of 1953, Deutscher put forward three possible variants for the future development of the Soviet Union: a relapse into Stalinist dictatorship, military rule, or a gradual evolution of the regime towards socialist democracy. Trotsky had considered the possibility of a fourth: workers’ political revolution. We now know that none of these variants resemble the actual course of Soviet development. Neither Deutscher nor the prophet himself anticipated the stagnation and then collapse of Stalinism in the direction of market capitalism.

Contrary to what Deutscher had hoped for (and he shares this with the Trotskyists), the demise of the Stalinist systems has not seen the collapse of the bureaucracy, in-stead sections of it are attempting to reconstitute them-selves as a capitalist ruling class. At the same time the Sovi-et working class, whilst developing new organisations, has not pushed itself forward as the rightful heirs. Instead it has stood aside, seemingly overwhelmed by the catastrophic collapse of the economy. Whilst some forms of democracy have been introduced, the old secret police is still largely intact and waiting to pounce if the need arises. Finally, no-where has the stagnation of Stalinism in its last couple of decades left a more poisonous legacy than in the national conflicts that have been ignited by its demise.

Of course today it is so easy to criticise with the ad-vantage of hindsight, and it must be remembered that Deutscher was writing at a time when Soviet economic growth rates and social progress were impressive, even if the official figures are treated with some scepticism. Simi-larly, expectations of gradual democratisation may have seemed to be the likely result of de-Stalinisation and liber-alisation under Khrushchev. Deutscher died before the ‘years of stagnation’ under Brezhnev could be fully compre-hended. Maybe the actual year of Deutscher’s death — 1967 — might tell us something. Had he lived another year he would have seen the suppression of the Prague Spring. Dubček’s ‘Socialism With a Human Face’ is reminiscent of Deutscher’s own hopes for the evolution of the Stalinist states. Had he lived to see these hopes crushed under the tracks of Warsaw Pact tanks maybe he would have revised his views.

Deutscher’s Differences With Trotsky

The sheer quality and depth of Deutscher’s writings have forced the Trotskyists to acknowledge their importance. However, any reviews or even passing references to Deutscher by Trotskyists usually feel obliged to include criticism of him over his differences with Trotsky. Nearly always these criticisms choose not to enlighten the reader, or the sect member, with any of the actual arguments in-volved in the dispute

Four of the key issues are sketched out below: Stalin and the degeneration of the Russian revolution; the ques-tion of Bonapartism; the prospects for workers’ revolution in the West; and the foundation of the Fourth Internation-al.

Stalin and Stalinism: Deutscher reviewed Trotsky’s biography of Stalin in July 1948 for the Times Literary Sup-

plement. Deutscher explains that some of the problems with the book were the result of the editing that was re-quired as Trotsky had only finished the first seven chapters by the time of his assassination. The rest was pieced to-gether from Trotsky’s notes and edited, sometimes incorpo-rating views contrary to Trotsky’s known opinions. Never-theless, Deutscher is critical of Trotsky’s own contributions, saying that it ‘is not a biography but an indictment of Sta-lin’.17

In his Stalin Trotsky wrote:

Altogether different [to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise] was the nature of Stalin’s rise. It is not comparable with anything in the past. He seems to have no pre-history. The process of his rise took place some-where behind an impenetrable political curtain. At a certain moment his figure, in the full panoply of power, suddenly stepped away from the Kremlin wall, and for the first time the world became aware of Stalin as a ready-made dictator.18

Here Trotsky denigrates Stalin, denying him even a ‘pre-history’. This despite Trotsky’s having had personal contact with Stalin in the Russian Social Democratic movement before the First World War. Whilst Stalin was not a leading Bolshevik before 1917, he was, however, well known. Deutscher writes:

… Stalin did not come to the fore like that. It is clear from Trotsky’s own revelations that ever since the October Revolution Stalin was one of the very few (the three to five) men who exercised power and that his practical, though not ideological, influence in the ruling group was second only to Lenin’s and Trotsky’s.19

Trotsky’s Stalin also says:

If the basis of comparison is sweep of personality, it is impossible to place Stalin even alongside Musso-lini or Hitler. However meagre the ‘ideas’ of Fas-cism, both the victorious leaders of reaction, the Italian and the German, from the beginning of their respective movements, displayed initiative, roused the masses to action, pioneered new paths through the political jungle. Nothing of this kind can be said about Stalin.20

In response to this Deutscher says in his review:

These words, written while Russia was entering the second decade of planned economy — that is, sever-al years after the collectivisation of 20-odd million farms — had a sufficiently unreal ring even eight or nine years ago; today they sound fantastic.21

To Deutscher’ s comments could be added Stalin’s leading role in the Soviet war effort, and his part in the creation of a political system which would be named after him that would soon be replicated in countries covering one-third of

17. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’, Heretics and Renegades (London, 1955), p 79.

18. Cited in ibid, pp 83-84. 19. Ibid, p 84. 20. Cited in ibid, p 84.

21. Ibid, p 84.


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the globe. Anti-working-class certainly, but hardly lacking initiative, an ability to rouse the masses, or develop new political paths.

Trotsky’s denigration of Stalin is not difficult to explain: the brutal treatment of Trotsky, his family and many thou-sands of supporters by the Stalinist bureaucracy took its toll of Trotsky’s ability to be historically objective about his persecutor. Less excusable is Trotsky’s contempt towards some other figures in the Communist movement which Deutscher also criticised elsewhere.22

However, and more importantly, Deutscher explained that:

It was not only Stalin’s personality which Trotsky al-so underrated. He underrated also the depth and strength of the social developments which had brought Stalin to the fore, though he himself had been the first to interpret those very developments to the world.23

In his Stalin, as elsewhere, Trotsky contrasts the earlier years of the revolution to the bureaucratic degeneration that followed it and accompanied Stalin’s rise to power. Whilst this was an important distinction to make,

22. For an example of Trotsky’s personal denigration of others in the Communist movement, see his ‘Who is Leading the Com-

intern Today?’, in Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) (New York, 1981), pp 182-211. Deutscher opposed such poison-ous attacks and Trotsky’s tendency to concentrate on one par-

ticular failing rather than make a balanced assessment based on the record of the person’s whole life. See Deutscher’s com-ments in LD Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932) (New

York, 1981), p 390 n 206: ‘He [Trotsky] was absolutely right in the substance of the controversy, but in the personal charac-terisation he allowed himself, in the heat of battle, to make

some polemical overstatements. When you republish these remarks now, you ought to pay attention, in my view, to two circumstances. First, all these leaders whom Trotsky mentions

were the founders of the Polish Communist Party, co-founders of the Communist International, active participants of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal movements, etc. In 1925 they all

protested, in the name of the Polish Central Committee, against Stalin’s and Zinoviev’s first anti-Trotskyist campaign. Secondly, all of them perished in the Stalinist purges in 1938.

Stalin never forgave them the protest against Trotsky's treat-ment. They were all denounced by Stalin as Trotskyists, spies, agents of the Polish political police, etc, and have all been em-

phatically rehabilitated in the post-Stalin era. Between 1925 and 1938, as émigrés in the USSR they did adjust themselves to the Stalin line. But they did so with many mental reservations

and with much anguish; and some of them, whenever they could, advised Polish Communists, coming to Russia on short trips, to work quietly within the Polish party against the Stalin-

ist line. To describe them now, as Trotsky did in 1926 or 1932, as ‘Menshevik types’ would be utterly wrong and unjust. War-ski…, like Walecki, Lapinski and Kostrzewa, were in the end

Bukharinists or near-Bukharinists, the leaders of the Right Op-position in the party, but not Menshevik types… There is no need to blur over the political mistakes they all made in their

quasi-Bukharinist period. But when one gives an appraisal of their activity three decades after their martyrdom, one should take into account the whole of their record, and not merely

one part of it; and one should treat them objectively and his-torically, without being too much affected by an epithet Trot-sky threw out in a particular situation…’

23. Deutscher, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’, Heretics and Renegades, p 84.

Deutscher identified a vital weakness in Trotsky’s ac-count:

What Trotsky understated was the extent to which the change from ‘Soviet democracy’ to ‘bureaucratic control’ had occurred in the Leninist period. He dis-tinguishes between the two phases of the revolution, but is reluctant fully to admit connection between them. It is true that Leninism was essentially non-totalitarian; but it is also true that by the end of the Civil War (say 1920 and 1921) it had, under the pres-sure of events, gradually, gropingly, almost uncon-sciously evolved towards totalitarianism. The birth of Bolshevik totalitarianism can be traced, with a high degree of precision, to the Tenth Congress of the party in 1921. It was on the foundations laid by the 1921 congress that Stalin built up his regime in later years.24

Unfortunately, Deutscher tends towards a view that these Bolshevik ‘gropings’ were just the inevitable consequence of the isolation of the Russian revolution and the devastation of the Civil War — the explanation goes no deeper. This can fairly be said, given Deutscher’s fundamental agree-ment with the Leninist/Trotskyist conception of the work-ers’ revolution, the vanguard party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This agreement can be illustrated by a brief quotation from Deutscher:

The idea that the working class is, or should be, the chief actor in social revolution determines the whole of Trotsky’s political thinking, his conception of the Soviet regime and of the Bolshevik party, and his en-tire struggle against the Social Democratic and Sta-linist orthodoxies. ‘Proletarian Democracy’ is the key notion of all his reasonings and arguments.25

Deutscher does not trace the authoritarian measures im-plemented by Lenin and Trotsky to the Bolshevik concep-tions of the party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The Bolshevik party concept is based on Lenin’s well-known claim that socialist consciousness cannot be gener-ated amongst the working class itself, but has to come from outside — from the Marxist intelligentsia. Connected to this is the need for a centralised, hierarchical and disci-plined party to ensure that the mass of party members fol-low the lead of this intelligentsia and are not led astray by other forces or views. Instead of Marxism living in the mass workers’ movement and working to raise and develop what was positive about the existing workers’ consciousness, Bolshevism claims to be the guardian of the only correct consciousness in which it intends to instruct the working class. As Victor Serge said in his Memoirs of a Revolution-ary: ‘Bolshevik thinking is grounded in the possession of the truth. The party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking which differs from it is a dangerous or reaction-ary error.’26

Similarly, the Bolshevik conception of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was of a party ruling on behalf of the class, in the name of the class, but over the class, not by it.

24. Ibid. 25. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Introduction’, in LD Trotsky, The Age of Per-

manent Revolution (New York, 1970), p 26.

26. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1963), p 134.


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It can be traced to a distortion of Marx by Plekhanov, pos-sibly influenced by the Narodnik tradition. Readers who are interested in a full account of this particular point should consult Hal Draper’s book The Dictatorship of the Proletari-at from Marx to Lenin.27 Bolshevism adopted this revised view as it fitted in with its party concept — the Bolshevik party would control the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ to defend the working class from its own false consciousness.

Deutscher’s own attachment to these fundamentals of Bolshevism prevents him from identifying seeds of totali-tarianism inherent in Leninism. In fact Deutscher approved of Trotsky’s abandonment of his earlier views, which are not so far removed from the criticisms made above. For an enthusiastic account of this conversion see Deutscher’s introduction to The Age of Permanent Revolution. Never-theless, however limited his explanation for Leninist totali-tarianism (that is, the ban on factions in the Bolshevik par-ty, the creation of a one-party state, the suppression of op-ponents, the formation of an unaccountable secret police, etc), at least Deutscher recognised it and saw it providing Stalinism’s foundations. In so doing, his understanding was superior to Trotsky’s.

In Deutscher’s view the political, economic and labour measures Trotsky encouraged at the height of his power were to provide some of the bases for Stalin’s rule in later years. These included policies such as War Communism’s forced requisitioning of food from the peasantry, the pro-posals to subject workers to military discipline and labour conscription, to integrate trade unions into the state and remove their autonomy, and exhortations to workers to sacrifice themselves almost Stakhanovite-style on the facto-ry floor. Deutscher writes: ‘Both Trotsky and Lenin appear, each in a different field, as Stalin’s unwitting inspirers and prompters.’28

In short, we might say that whilst Deutscher did not see any of the contributory causes of totalitarian dictatorship in Bolshevik theories, he did see some of them in Bolshevik practice.

Bonapartism: Here, Deutscher differed with Trotsky in two important instances: over the latter’s analogy of Ther-midor and Bonapartism in respect of Stalin’s rule, and over Piłsudski’s coup in Poland.

Deutscher and Trotsky shared a similar, Marxist, under-standing of Bonapartism. Essentially, this was rule by the state bureaucracy or the military in conditions where nor-mal political rule by the socially dominant class was no longer possible or reliable. Bonapartism comes in to expro-priate politically the dominant class whilst preserving, in essentials, the social and economic position of that class.

Clearly, whether Stalinism was Bonapartism or not de-pends on one’s conception of the Moscow regime. Unlike these writers, Deutscher held to the fundamentals of Trot-sky’s view that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state. Yet even within this framework, Deutscher provides some serious criticisms of Trotsky’s view of Thermidor and Bona-partism.

Deutscher agrees that executive rule politically inde-pendent of the social classes in society could describe Sta-lin’s rule:

27. Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin (New York, 1987).

28. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p 515.

Yet, the equation only offers a very general and vague clue to the understanding of the phenomenon in all its complexity and contradictoriness. Stalin exercised his rule not so much through an ‘inde-pendent’ state machine as through the ‘independ-ent’ party machine through which he also controlled the state. The difference was of great consequence to the course of the revolution and the political cli-mate of the Soviet Union.29

The rule of the Bolshevik party provided continuity in the form of political rule from, say, 1921 (with the creation of a one-party state and a ban on internal factions, etc) to at least the years of the Great Terror in 1936-38. The expulsion of the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ oppositions were said to be justi-fied by the ban on factions. Stalin’s personal rule did not become absolute until these purges, until that time there was a recognised ‘moderate’ wing around Kirov which had political differences with the Stalin group.

Soviet Bonapartism was the political rule of the party machine, not a social class, but as Deutscher says: ‘We have seen that the rule of the party machine had in fact been initiated at the close of the Lenin era.’30 Deutscher argued that Trotsky made an error by using an analogy to the French Revolution to explain the course of the Russian one:

We would have to imagine what revolutionary France would have looked like if the Thermidorians had never overthrown Robespierre, and if he had ruled France, in the name of a crippled and docile Jacobin party, throughout all those years that the historian now describes as the eras of the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire — in a word, what France would have looked like if no Napoleon had ever come to the fore and if the revolution had run its full course under the banner of Jacobinism.31

Did Stalin bring in a Soviet Thermidor? Deutscher says that the period of Thermidor in the French Revolution brought an end to the Jacobin terror, but did not either reverse the revolution’s social and economic changes or extend them, rather it consolidated them. Politically it represented the interests of the bourgeoisie rather than the plebs. However, Stalin’s rise was not such a Thermidor: political terror in-creased, whilst economically the ‘most comprehensive and radical acts, the expropriation and collectivisation of all individual farmers, the initiation of planned economy, took place only after Stalin’s ascendancy’.32

Most importantly, Deutscher sees Trotsky’s Thermidor and Bonapartism analogy as confusing his Left Opposition in the 1920s. For example, Deutscher relates how in 1928 Trotsky warned about the dangers of Bonapartism in the USSR. However, Trotsky was calling for the gate to be shut after the horse had already bolted: all the features of Bona-partism, in the form of rule by the party machine, were in place by the last years of Lenin’s government. All that re-mained was for personal rule to provide its full consumma-tion.33 Once again, Trotsky could not see that the draconian measures introduced by the Lenin–Trotsky government in

29. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp 462-63.

30. Ibid, p 463. 31. Ibid. 32. Deutscher, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’, Heretics and Renegades, p 85.

33. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p 463.


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the Civil War and after had produced a victory, but a victo-ry that also contained the seeds of his own defeat.

Deutscher’s other difference with Trotsky over Bona-partism occurred over Poland. In his 1934 article ‘Bonapart-ism and Fascism’ Trotsky wrote: ‘The question “fascism or Bonapartism?” has engendered certain differences on the subject of the Piłsudski regime among our Polish com-rades.’34 Deutscher was one of these Polish comrades. This dispute is covered in the above-mentioned article by Trot-sky, and from Deutscher’s side in his essay ‘The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party’ and in The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky had written:

Piłsudski came to power at the end of an insurrec-tion based upon a mass movement of the petit-bourgeoisie and aimed directly at the domination of the traditional bourgeois parties in the name of the ‘strong state’; that is a fascist trait characteristic of the movement and of the regime.35

However, Trotsky qualified this by explaining that the Piłsudski regime was less repressive than, say, Mussolini’s or Hitler’s because ‘its specific political weight, that is, the mass of Polish fascism was much weaker than that of Ital-ian fascism in its time and still more so than that of Ger-man fascism…’.36

According to Trotsky, Piłsudski’s mass movement, be-ing weaker, forced him to rely more on the existing military apparatus, and made his regime less able to attack the working class, which could therefore offer more effective resistance in the absence of a stronger fascist movement.

Deutscher says that in his coup: ‘Piłsudski expropriated the Polish landlords and bourgeoisie politically in order to preserve their social domination over the proletariat and peasantry.’37 Here Deutscher and Trotsky agree, but this could be a feature of both fascism and Bonapartism. The key question was over the nature of the forces behind Piłsudski’s coup — was there a fascist mass movement of the petit-bourgeoisie?

The problems afflicting Poland in the interwar years were formidable. It faced all the difficulties of a new state having only just won freedom from the collapse of the sur-rounding empires. In addition, it was a backward society struggling with the traumas of industrialisation. Political instability was an almost inevitable feature. It was against such a background and particularly the impasse of succes-sive coalition governments in an unstable parliamentary system that Piłsudski’s coup took place. Behind Piłsudski on the morning of his coup were several mutinous regi-ments of troops. The government resisted, which was per-haps unexpected by Piłsudski. However, he was at the point of no return, and after three days of fighting between loyal and rebel soldiers Piłsudski’s forces captured the key strate-gic sites in Warsaw. The government enjoyed more popular support in the country as a whole and the stronger forces, but, in the words of one historian, ‘the issue was settled by the socialist railwaymen whose strike paralysed communi-

34. LD Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, Writings of Leon Trot-sky (1934-35) (New York, 1974), p 56.

35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Deutscher, ‘The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party’,

Marxism in Our Time, p 133.

cations and prevented reinforcements from reaching the capital’.38

Thus, Piłsudski won because the government could not organise their defences any more effectively than they had previously run the country. Piłsudski, it is clear from this account, had no ‘mass fascist movement’ behind him — only some mutinous regiments and striking railwaymen. Deutscher goes further than this to say:

Throughout the 20 years between the two wars, the objective conditions favourable to the rise of a real fascist dictatorship did not exist in Poland, if by ‘fas-cist’ we understand a totalitarian dictatorship based on a strong and clearly counter-revolutionary mass movement.39

What is more, Piłsudski did not proceed to set up a regime of personal dictatorship, but a ‘pseudo-parliamentary cha-rade’.40 Deutscher, in fact, did not characterise Piłsudski’s regime as Bonapartist, but rather as ‘pseudo-Bonapartist’ in acknowledgement of this parliamentary element. When Piłsudski took power in 1926, he was not the candidate of the right wing. Although it was misguided of the railway-men, and certainly of the Polish Communist Party, to sup-port his power bid, they did have some reasons for doing so — believing that he would follow his political expropriation of the bourgeoisie with a social expropriation of the ruling class. Piłsudski’s role was to try and consolidate Polish capi-talist rule by, amongst other things, coopting sections of the Polish working class to support his rule. His role was not, therefore, to smash the workers’ movement by means of an open dictatorship.

Deutscher also explains the ‘pseudo-Bonapartist’ na-ture of the regime, pointing out that Piłsudski operated with different prime ministers in a multi-party system.41 Clearly, it was not a fascist regime, and it did not come to power through a mass fascist movement of the petit-bourgeoisie.

The Prospects for Revolution in the West: Trotsky, as is well known, believed that whilst a revolution could take place first in Russia (as it was the weakest link in the imperialist chain), the task of building socialism itself could only follow successful revolutions in the Western countries. The expectations he had for these countries are therefore crucial.

Deutscher contrasts Trotsky’s prediction of revolutions in the West (Germany, France, Britain and the USA) with the actual developments where revolutions took place in the underdeveloped countries of the East:

The fault of this perspective (if this is the right term here) is closely connected with the Marxist assessment of the role of the industrial working class in modern society… Yet none of the social upheavals of the last two decades has been strictly ‘the work of the workers’. All have been carried out by closely knit military organisations and/or small bureaucratic parties; and the peasantry has been

38. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol-ume 2 (Oxford, 1981), p 422.

39. Deutscher, ‘The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party’, Marxism in Our Time, p 132.

40. Davies, God’s Playground, Volume 2, p 422.

41. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast (London, 1963), p 276.


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far more active in them than the industrial prole-tariat.42

In response to this Trotsky and the Trotskyists raise the question of the misleadership of the workers’ movement by reformists, Stalinists, nationalists, etc. Yet this merely begged the further question, and continues to do so today, as to why, if the proletariat desired the socialist transfor-mation of society, did it continually tolerate misleaders? If it was only the betrayal of leaders holding it back then why didn’t the working class throw aside these leaders or create new instruments to by-pass them? Deutscher held similar criticisms:

No social class with a real and significant momen-tum of its own will allow itself to be diverted from its essential objectives by any outside influence. If Trotsky’s view that the influence of Moscow had acted as the decisive break on European revolution were correct, it would merely testify to the relative weakness of the revolutionary proletarian element in Western Europe.43

Trotsky’s faith — and we have to use this word, as it was a religious belief rather than a sober assessment of real situa-tions and practical possibilities — in workers’ revolution in the West was a conviction he maintained until the end. Only one example will be given here, the one central to the expectations of all Bolsheviks — Germany.

Deutscher quotes Trotsky as saying that the failure of the socialist revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War was ‘improbable’. When pressed by those who doubted this Trotsky ‘dodged it’.44 Revolution came in Germany alright, and the workers achieved their aims — but these were the ending of the war, the fall of the Kaiser, and the creation of a democratic republic. Socialist revolu-tion was not the aim of the November 1918 revolution. As Deutscher says, both Lenin and Trotsky failed to see the significance of the defeat of the January 1919 rising in Ber-lin. It was a turning point.45

Furthermore, the January 1919 revolt failed above all be-cause it only had the support of a minority of the proletari-at. After the trauma of war and one revolution, the German masses wanted to rest — their aims, though not those of the Bolsheviks, had been won.

Deutscher in The Prophet Armed says that Stalin (before the latter became a dictator whose only comments about Trotsky were falsifications) claimed that Trotsky was at his best in times where the revolution gained momentum, but weak in times of retreat.46 Deutscher also relates how ‘Krupskaya once made the remark, which in all probability she had picked up from Lenin, that Trotsky was inclined to underrate the apathy of the masses’.47 Deutscher shared these views, and when one compares Trotsky’s expectations with actual events so many years later, it is surely very diffi-cult not to agree with him.

The Fourth International: Deutscher’s most well-

42. Deutscher, ‘Introduction’, The Age of Permanent Revolution, p 24.

43. Deutscher, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’, Heretics and Renegades, p 89.

44. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p 246. 45. Ibid, p 452. 46. Ibid, pp 176-77.

47. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p 461.

known dispute with Trotsky and Trotskyism was over the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. Deutscher covers this in full in The Prophet Outcast.48 At the founda-tion conference of the Fourth International, the Polish sec-tion of the international Trotskyist movement, under the influence of Deutscher (who was not present), stated its opposition to its proclamation.

The first argument was that it would be ill-advised to found the Fourth International whilst the international workers’ movement was in a period of retreat. The previous Internationals had been formed during times of progress for the workers’ movement.

Secondly, the acute reaction throughout much of the world and the rise of repressive dictatorships would make it impossible to win workers to the ranks of the Fourth Inter-national through open work.

Thirdly, they argued that the Trotskyist movement was making a major error by underestimating the continuing hold of the Second and Third Internationals.

Deutscher claims that the arguments of the Poles were never addressed. Instead they were met with abuse — the label of Menshevism was thrown at them.

Trotsky was, of course, aware that the Fourth Interna-tional was being founded in a period of defeats for the working class. He justified the foundation of the Fourth International because of his expectations, once again, of revolutionary developments that could be anticipated after the approaching war: ‘… in the course of the coming 10 years the programme of the Fourth International will gain the adherence of millions, and these revolutionary millions will be able to storm heaven and earth’.49 The Trotskyists would need the high profile of their own International to attract the workers. However, the ‘revolutionary millions’ failed to come over to the Fourth International because the aspirations of workers in the various countries either never went beyond a desire for peace and the replacement of fascism by democracy, or where it was more advanced the mood was not strong enough to break through the continuing influence of social democracy and Stalinism over the movement.

Deutscher also criticised the decision to found the Third International in 1919 on similar grounds. Again the perspective of imminent revolution in the West was false: ‘It is doubtful whether Lenin and Trotsky would have founded the International at this stage if they had had a clearer perception of the condition in Europe.’50 Instead, without intending it, Lenin and Trotsky gave ‘an assort-ment of small political sects the high-sounding label of the International’.51 Previously, as Deutscher relates, Lenin and Trotsky (in the time of Zimmerwald and Kienthal) had the view that a new International would supersede the Second and command the allegiance of the majority of the workers of the different countries, or the revolutionaries would re-main as a Marxist wing of the existing movement. They did not see the International as a rival separate body competing as a minority to the majority one.

Whilst the Third International did win sizeable support despite being a minority current internationally, the Fourth International did not manage to do this.

48. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, pp 421-29. 49. Ibid, p 426. 50. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p 452.

51. Ibid.


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Conclusion

What significance does any of this have for Marxists today? The momentous events of recent years in Eastern Europe where not only Stalinism but the Leninist heritage has been abandoned poses serious questions for the Lenin-ist/Trotskyist current internationally. Those seeking to ad-dress those questions and critically to assess the record of the ‘revolutionary’ groups and their Bolshevik predecessors will probably come across the writings of Isaac Deutscher. In these writings they will find a treasure chest of Marxist analyses and accounts of lessons great and small from the his-tory of the history of the international workers’ movement.

At the same time it must also be said that in Deutscher they should not expect to find a coherent alternative. This

is so for two reasons. Firstly, it can hardly be expected that one man working alone and mainly outside of any move-ment could produce such an alternative. Secondly, Deutscher’s own political history started in the Polish Communist Party with its own traditions of Marxism in the Rosa Luxemburg school. Deutscher’s writings are rich in this classical Marxism. Also present, however, is influence from the Bolshevik tradition — especially its conceptions of the party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Isaac Deutscher’s contribution to revolutionary Marx-ism is immense. These writers find it difficult to name someone who has performed a comparable role in the postwar period. Trotskyism was a heresy for the official communist movement. Deutscher was, albeit to differing extents, a heretic for both schools.

Chris Gray

The Heritage We Find Indefensible and the Myth of

‘Pabloism’

HE Socialist Equality Party publication entitled The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist

Equality Party (Mehring Books, 2008) has merit in that it lifts a corner of the veil covering the factional struggles attendant upon the explosive break-up of the Workers Rev-olutionary Party in 1985-86. That is to say, it lifts it if you have not read the previously published analysis by David North entitled The Heritage We Defend (Labor Publica-tions, 1988).

The political stance of the SEP has, in comparison with much of the left, quite a lot to commend it. But it is impos-sible to follow the comrades in their diehard defence of the ‘anti-Pabloites’ in the Fourth International from 1953 to the present, because to do so would be to father the deleterious practices and misconceptions originating therein upon the evil genius of one Mikhailis Raptis, also known as Pablo — a procedure that would be quite unwarranted, since the mistakes of ‘Trotskyism’ became evident earlier than the famous (or notorious) 1953 split.

Natalia’s Letter

In opposition to the SEP comrades, I would not start where they start. I would start with the letter written by Natalia Sedova, Leon Trotsky’s widow, to the Fourth International and the American Socialist Workers Party. (For the full text, see The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists: Some Documents (Pluto Press, 1971), pp 101-04.)

In the best traditions of our movement, Natalia pulls no punches. She writes:

Obsessed by old and outlived formulas, you contin-ue to regard the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you in this.

There is hardly a country in the world where the authentic ideas and bearers of socialism are so bar-barously hounded. It should be clear to everyone that the revolution has been completely destroyed by Stalinism. Yet you continue to say that, under this unspeakable regime, Russia is still a workers’ state. I consider this is a blow at socialism. Stalinism and the Stalinist state have nothing whatever in common with a workers’ state or with socialism. They are the worst and most dangerous enemies of socialism and the working class. (p 102)

Natalia goes on to flay the FI over their uncritical attitude to Tito’s Yugoslav regime:

Your entire press is now devoted to an inexcusable idealisation of the Titoist bureaucracy, for which no ground exists in the traditions and principles of our movement. (p 103)

Over the page Natalia continues her attack with an assault on the Fourth International’s position on the Korean War:

You are even now supporting the armies of Stalin-ism in the war which is being endured by the an-guished Korean people. I cannot and will not follow you in this…

I know very well how often you repeat that you are criticising Stalinism and fighting it. But the fact

T


19

is that your criticism and your fight lose their value and can yield no results because they are deter-mined by and subordinated to your position of de-fence of the Stalinist state. Whoever defends this re-gime of barbarous oppression, regardless of motives, abandons the principles of socialism and interna-tionalism. (p 104)

Unfortunately, Natalia goes on to make an unwarranted judgement based on her husband’s approach to the under-lying trajectory of the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR. She writes that:

Time and again, he pointed out how the consolida-tion of Stalinism in Russia led to the worsening of the economic, political and social conditions of the working class, and the triumph of a tyrannical and privileged aristocracy. If this trend continues, he said, the revolution will be at an end and the resto-ration of capitalism will be achieved.

That, unfortunately, is what has happened even if in new and unexpected forms. (p 102)

In my opinion Natalia was about 40 years ahead of history in this characterisation. Capitalism has indeed been re-stored in the territories of the former USSR, but only with the emergence of Boris Yeltsin as supreme and the suppres-sion of erstwhile supporters of the state bureaucracy. This state bureaucracy never constituted a capitalist class as such, despite its inability to progress beyond capitalism; it never created a viable mode of production led by its own forces, and it never succeeded in handing on its own privi-leges to its children. Furthermore, its own economic rule is not explicable via an analysis derived from the modus operandi of capitalism as we know it. (See Hillel Ticktin, Origins of Crisis in the USSR (ME Sharpe, Armonk NY, 2002).)

Simon Pirani on the Critical Years 1920-24

In order to appreciate the true legacy of the 1917 revolution and the political current known as Trotskyism — a current which, I repeat, has much to commend it — it is necessary to engage with the history of the USSR from 1921 to 1929, the period which saw the bureaucracy’s rise to power. We are fortunate in having Simon Pirani’s study of the earlier part of the period, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1921-1924 (Routledge, 2008). In Pirani’s own words:

This book argues that one of the most important choices the Bolsheviks made at this point was to turn their backs on forms of collective, participatory democracy that workers briefly attempted to revive. It challenges the notion, persistent among left-wing historians, that political power was forced on the Bolsheviks because the working class was so weak-ened by the civil war that it was incapable of wield-ing it. In reality, non-party workers were willing and able to participate in political processes, but, in the Moscow soviet and elsewhere, were pushed out of them by the Bolsheviks. The party’s vanguardism, that is, its conviction that it had the right, and the duty, to make political decisions on the workers’ behalf, was now reinforced by its control of the state apparatus. (p 4)

It could be argued that Pirani fails to go into the crucial civil war years from 1918 to 1921 in sufficient detail — years when, as he puts it, the ‘terrible weight of adverse condi-tions forced the hands of the Bolsheviks’ (p 3); however, he does go some way to indicate the Bolsheviks’ dilemma here, as they struggled to deal with the chaos created by the First World War and the collapse of industrial production — conditions which had provided them with the opportunity to seize power in the first place. Pirani notes that:

As the Bolsheviks contended with the economic breakdown, they campaigned, and turned the trade unions and factory committees to campaign, for la-bour discipline; and they combined labour mobilisa-tion techniques with labour compulsion measures, including militarisation. Often, workplace organisa-tions — and presumably workers themselves — supported these measures, and in some cases pro-posed still harsher ones. Most of the time, most an-ti-Bolshevik workers’ parties supported such measures too, although the Mensheviks and others bridled at labour compulsion. Organised independ-ent workers’ action had peaked in the spring of 1918 in Petrograd, with a strike wave and the convening of an independent factory representatives’ assembly, and was soon suppressed. In the two years that fol-lowed, workers’ reactions to the labour regime and the supply crisis were as often individual as collec-tive. There were scattered strikes and protests, mostly over rations, but more often there was ab-senteeism, skilled workers quitting the job and mov-ing elsewhere, and the use of factory machinery to make objects for sale or home use. (p 6)

The Leading Role of the Party

The habit of command, bolstered by the exigencies and deprivations of the Civil War, received Lenin’s explicit en-dorsement — and, in view of the situation that the Bolshe-viks found themselves in, trying to hang on until the Euro-pean workers’ revolution could come to their aid, this is hardly surprising. At the Second Comintern Congress, held in July 1920, Lenin referred to some remarks by Comrade Tanner of the British Socialist Party (one of the forerunners of the Communist Party in the UK):

Tanner says that he stands for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but he does not see the dictatorship of the proletariat quite in the way we do. He says that by the dictatorship of the proletariat we actual-ly mean the dictatorship of the organised and class-conscious minority of the proletariat.

True enough, in the era of capitalism, when the masses of the workers are subjected to constant ex-ploitation and cannot develop their human capaci-ties, the most characteristic feature of working-class political parties is that they can involve only a mi-nority of their class. A political party can comprise only a minority of a class, in the same way as the re-ally class-conscious workers in any capitalist society constitute only a minority of all workers. We are therefore obliged to recognise that it is only this class-conscious minority that can direct and lead the broad masses of the workers. (‘Speech on the


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Role of the Communist Party’, 23 July 1920, Collected Works, Volume 31, p 235)

For Lenin in 1920, therefore, the dictatorship of the prole-tariat became synonymous (in practice) with the exclusive rule of the Communist Party, because that institution was the embodiment of the ‘really class-conscious’ workers. Aside from the questions of who decides whether a worker is or is not ‘class-conscious’ and just what this ‘class-consciousness’ ostensibly consists of, it must be obvious that such a form of government can endure only temporari-ly. The revolutionary regimes that emerged in the English Civil War following the execution of King Charles I repre-sented the ‘class-conscious minority’ of the anti-monarchist population, but the English Republic lasted barely a decade before the monarchy’s restoration in 1660. The French Rev-olution of 1789-94 shows a similar pattern with a consider-ably shorter radical regime — the Jacobin dictatorship. Likewise the Bolshevik regime, expressive of the ‘dictator-ship of the proletariat’, lasted just over a decade before giv-ing way to the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The whole Bolshevik project depended on the extension of the revolu-tion (above all in Germany), which, if it had taken place, might have led to a situation in which the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the broader sense of the rule of the work-ing class as a whole, was realisable on a continental scale. However, for several reasons such an eventuality did not materialise.

It can be said that Lenin and Trotsky made a virtue of necessity: they wished to retain power at all costs — which explains the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt, the adop-tion of the ‘New Economic Policy’ allowing a limited return to capitalist market conditions, and the suppression of in-dependent working-class initiatives which Pirani docu-ments. We should also recognise that, having arrived at this position, Lenin and Trotsky did not rigidly adhere to it thereafter. Lenin became acutely aware of the danger threatening from within the state itself in his last years, and attempted to wage a campaign against this. (See Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Pluto Press, 1975).) Trotsky later wrote The Revolution Betrayed, in which he stated that:

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. (The Revolution Betrayed (Labor Publications, Detroit, 1991), p 246)

Kunal Chattopadhyay, in The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, has drawn our attention to the importance of this section of the book:

The actual state was, Trotsky said, being changed by the judicial liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He affirmed the anti-democratic nature of the state. In a long discussion he showed that without a multiplicity of parties the promise of so-cialist democracy was a vulgar joke at the expense of the downtrodden. This remains the sole classical Marxist statement since the Russian revolution’s de-cline that is unambiguous on this point. (The Marx-ism of Leon Trotsky (Progressive Publishers, Kolka-ta, 2006), p 538)

I believe Chattopadhyay’s assessment is essentially correct. In connexion with Stalin’s 1936 Constitution, Trotsky wrote:

The promise to give the Soviet people freedom to vote ‘for those whom they want to elect’ is rather a poetic image than a political formula. The Soviet people will have the right to choose their ‘represent-atives’ only from among candidates whom the cen-tral and local leaders present to them under the flag of the party. To be sure, during the first period of the Soviet era, the Bolshevik Party also exercised a monopoly. But to identify these two phenomena would be to take appearance for essence. The prohi-bition of opposition parties was a temporary meas-ure dictated by conditions of civil war, blockade and famine. The ruling party, representing in that period a genuine organisation of the proletarian vanguard, was living a full-blooded inner life [at least until the ban on factions in 1921 — CG]: the struggle of groups and factions to a certain degree replaced the struggle of parties. At present, when socialism [this word surely requires inverted commas in this con-text — CG] has conquered ‘finally and irrevocably’, the formation of factions is punished with concen-tration camp or firing squad. The prohibition of other parties, from being a temporary evil, has been elevated into a principle. (The Revolution Betrayed, p 226)

The Fighting Value of the ‘Vanguard’

The question of what constitutes ‘class-consciousness’ in a given situation is both a theoretical and a practical one, involving as it does a consideration of the immediate and long-term political interests of the working class. The ‘revo-lutionary vanguard’ tends to think that because, in its eyes, it is this very vanguard, it knows better than the average worker, or those currently leading the average worker, what should be done in a given context. But this is not necessari-ly the case. Eric Morse satirised such élitist attitudes many years ago in a song to the tune of ‘Maryland’ (or ‘The Red Flag’) featuring the lines:

The cause is surely won this year Because the leadership is here, For Khrushchev’s boys, and Trotsky’s too, Now guide us in the work we do.

The Left and the Great Miners’ Strike

Dave Douglass, who played a prominent part in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, has a piece on the same subject entitled ‘The Charge of the Left Brigade’. This examines the response of the left groups to the strike. (See Class War Federation’s magazine, Heavy Stuff, no 5, July 1992, pp 17-22.) The theme is also present in Douglass’ autobiography Stardust to Coal-dust, in three volumes, published by Read and Noir, 2008, 2009, 2010, and in Pit Sense Versus the State (Phoenix Press, c 1994).

Douglass’ critique of (primarily) the British Socialist Workers Party (and Arthur Scargill) is devastating:

The SWP, despite a venomously anti-union verbiage [This is news to me, but then I didn’t read Socialist Worker during the miners’ strike — CG] strangely


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shares the same bureaucratic vision and faith in the workers as do NUM bureaucrats. To this day they don’t really understand the tactics employed in the ‘84/85 strike and never really grasped the pickets’ perspective of the struggle. Instead they basked in the reflected glow of Arthur Scargill’s General Cus-ter impersonation — Never mind the tactics, Charge! …

If the different perspectives can be summed up in military terms, Arthur and the SWP saw them-selves as the vanguard of the class army lined up against the ruling class enemy in a do-or-die battle at Orgreave — we saw ourselves as a guerrilla group of rarely more than 20 000 pickets nationally, fighting a massive deployment of police with the full range of computer and surveillance equipment. Standing toe to toe we would always be battered, so we used guerrilla tactics; blocking the M1, hit-squad raids on scab pits or police bases, blocking the Humber Bridge, ruse tactics to draw the mass of po-lice off somewhere else while our main force de-ployed to some least expected power station, wharf or scab pit. Because of the absolute need for secrecy only the elected picket coordinators knew the plan; village pubs had posters on the walls: ‘Keep Picket Targets Secret: The Walls Have Ears!’

These targets drove the SWP to distraction, be-cause they didn’t know where the action was until after we’d been and gone and done it. This is very troubling if you’re a vanguard! Arthur was similarly distressed but he also had no control or say over the direction of our targets or the manner in which we conducted these attacks. We also differed on per-ceptions of the struggle. Arthur saw Orgreave as a Saltley Gate, a rallying point for the whole trade un-ion movement and the left; mass enough of our class together and we could swamp them. This strategy was fatally flawed, not least because we’d tried it at Grunwick and, despite more support than the min-ers got, had still lost it. For things had changed since Saltley [1972], not simply the responses or lack of them from union members, but also the degree to which the police had been given their head and told not to back off. (‘The Charge of the Left Brigade’, Heavy Stuff, no 5, 1992, p 18)

Douglass argues that once Scargill decided that he would make his stand at Orgreave and called for support, the miners were obliged to stand with him:

Ditch warfare, the replay of the First World War, had started at Orgreave, the fight was happening and we had no choice but to join it. Fierce we were and unrestrained, publicly uncritical, but we knew it to be foolish in the extreme. The left viewed it like the Charge of the Light Brigade — bloody but mag-nificent. (p 19)

Dave is equally merciless when dealing with the approach of the WRP:

The WRP operated in the revolutionary Hall of Mir-rors which decrees that all workers’ struggles are doomed without them being led by the Revolution-

ary Party, namely themselves. So then it follows that anything the working class do is doomed, a blind al-ley, because it hasn’t been led by them. For people like myself, field officers of the struggle, it was au-tomatic that we would betray the struggle, because we weren’t part of the revolutionary party. Mass picketing, hit squads, anti-scab, anti-police assaults were all a dead end, they said. Instead they offered us a real solution: The miners should call on the TUC General Council to lead a General Strike!

We replied: Woah, woah, we’re the MINERS. Don’t you know TUC will never organise a general strike and if they did they’d only betray it as they did in 1926 — so why call it?

Because us dumb chucks, the rank-and-file pit-men and our families and the workers at large need to be shown that the existing trade union structure is no good for this sort of battle and it should be left to the Revolutionary Party. [A classic case of substi-tutionism if so, of the type condemned by Leon Trotsky in 1904 — CG.]

Get it? Urge us into a defeat, we get smashed, then pick up the pieces to build your own outfit… nice. Trouble with this theory is, we’d already been there in 1926. Miners’ children are weaned on the story of that betrayal of the miners by the TUC. We grew up knowing the limitations of the TUC General Council and that’s why we would never accept that stupid slogan of the WRP. If this was a sample of their organisational worth over the NUM, is it any wonder the NUM continued the struggle with fire and pride whilst the WRP stood under umbrellas for fear of the rain and tried pathetically to sell papers so wet you couldn’t light a fire with them. (p 20)

Douglass concludes that under the circumstances all that trade union activists can do is make the best of a bad job, using the official union structure where possible and cir-cumventing it where necessary:

We have need for the formal structure of the NUM for welfare benefits, for countless legal, injury and death cases. So we maintain it, at the same time go-ing round it, over it and underneath it to do what we want to do. The SWP thinks we have it wrong, because frankly they don’t understand our relation-ship with official and unofficial aspects of our organ-isations. But as a matter of fact, why should they? (p 21)

Douglass finishes his article by speaking to revolutionary leftists directly — and the article as a whole is obligatory reading for all revolutionary socialist organisations world-wide. His final sentence runs:

We will be of relevance so long as we intervene, without preconditions, without delusions of van-guardism, into actual struggles of the working class, not standing outside the class mocking the crude at-tempts at combat organisations the workers have built, but alongside them, as part of them. (p 22)

Once Again, Pablo

To return to the nefarious activities of one Raptis/Pablo.


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Yes, of course, the Socialist Labour League were both for-mally and practically correct against the perspective he put forward in the 1950s. The Socialist Equality Party’s book is quite right to attack Pablo and Ernest Mandel for their atti-tude to Stalinist and social-democratic parties as an aban-donment of any independent perspective for the Fourth International, in the process ‘transforming the Fourth In-ternational into a pressure group on the existing leadership of the working class and national movements’ (p 70).

Likewise the picture of the advance to socialism occur-ring via ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’ was a mi-rage, bringing dire results everywhere, involving an en-dorsement of ‘false claims made on behalf of the Stalinist bureaucracy’ and also of ‘bourgeois nationalist movements

in the semi-colonial and under-developed countries’ (p 72).

But the SLL/WRP went on to replicate much of this ap-proach, as the book’s author or authors indicate (see pp 110-20) and the America SWP ended up embracing Castro and ditching the political heritage of Leon Trotsky (pp 80-81, 88-90). Was this simply the result of false moves on the part of leaders such as Gerry Healy, James Cannon, Joe Hansen, Jack Barnes & Co? The pressure of capitalism and imperialism is intense: it can affect not only leaders but an organisation’s tradition as handed down. And mere formal correctness is not enough — concrete thoroughgoing anal-ysis of the situation facing the working class internationally is mandatory.

Harry Ratner

Capturing the Capitalist Citadel From Outside and From Within

HAT are the chances of successful socialist revolu-tion world-wide? I would say ‘very small’. I can visu-

alise many who read this bald statement will immediately decide to read no further — concluding that Harry Ratner has finally given up and can no longer be considered a so-cialist. So let me explain what I mean. I am saying the chances are very slim if we visualise the triumph of social-ism purely in terms of Marxist ideology — or more accu-rately its Leninist-Trotskyist version — but more likely to be better if we look beyond the Leninist-Trotskyist scenario to other possibilities.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘the Leninist-Trotskyist scenario’. It derives from Marxist historical materialism that sees human societies developing according to objective laws through progressive stages — primitive communism, slave societies, feudalism, to present-day capitalism. The next historically-determined stage will be communism. The triumph of communism is almost guaranteed because the growing contradictions of capitalism lead to repeated crises and because capitalism has created its own grave-diggers in the shape of the proletariat. And Marxism gives to this pro-letariat an inevitable role — the overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by a communist society. Ac-cording to Marx:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian or even the whole proletarian movement momen-tarily imagines to be the aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is and what it is historically compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is prescribed ir-revocably and obviously in its own situation in life as well as in the entire organisation of contemporary civil society. (The Holy Family)

The engine of progress is class struggle; in the past it was the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism; today

it is the struggle of the working class against the capital-ist class.

Add to this the Marxist concept of the state as ‘the ex-ecutive of the ruling class’ and the need for the working class to destroy the capitalist state machine and replace it with a ‘workers’ state’.

Flowing from these premises, the Leninist-Trotskyist scenario is as follows. The deepening crisis of capitalism, with economic collapse, wars and ecological disasters, drives the workers and other oppressed layers into action: strikes, factory occupations, demonstrations, riots. Social-ists participate in these movements, and in the process socialist/revolutionary/radical parties are built (or, accord-ing to other comrades, existing social-democratic or left parties are transformed from within into these parties), and these parties now achieve power and proceed to start trans-forming society in a socialist direction.

In the Leninist-Trotskyist perspective this conquest of power is unlikely to be achieved — even in bourgeois-democratic nations — peacefully through electoral victo-ries. Even if a radical socialist movement won a majority in parliament, reactionary forces would do their utmost to destabilise and sabotage it, and when all else failed to over-throw it by violent means as did Pinochet in Chile. Given the hatred aroused by even the mildly reformist bourgeois Barak Obama in the United States and his very limited pub-lic health measures and the antics of the loony right, the ‘militias’ and the Tea Party movement, it is likely that even the mere possibility of a socialist congress would trigger a civil war.1

1. That, I must stress, does not validate the concept of the ex-

treme-left rejection of parliament and a call for non-existent soviets, a refusal to embark on the parliamentary road thus iso-lating ourselves from a majority of the working class who still

believe that the only way to choose a government is through

W


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The Conditions for Success — And Failed Revolutions

These conditions can be the coincidence of both subjective and objective factors. The main subjective factor is the po-litical consciousness of the working class and its willingness to support the revolutionary forces. This means that the revolutionary party must be able to call on the active mili-tary support of a sufficiently large layer of the working class and the oppressed.

In the light of Marx’s expressed belief in the historically determined role of the working class, it would seem that this willingness of the working class to support revolution is almost guaranteed. It is acceptance of the truth of Marx’s assertion that gives revolutionaries the optimism and con-fidence that is necessary to overcome all dangers and ob-stacles. Here I must reluctantly pour cold water on this optimism. More than a century and a half has elapsed since Marx’s pronouncement; it is nearly a hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War indicated to Marxists that capitalism had reached the limits of its growth and opened ‘a period of wars and revolutions’. Since then we have lived through two destructive world wars, periods of mass unemployment and numerous economic crises. Yet in no advanced capitalist country has a revolutionary party, committed to socialist transformation, won the support of a majority of the working class. In no advanced capitalist country has a successful socialist revolution occurred. Only in backward Russia did a revolutionary party win power — in 1917 — and then could only hold on to power by evolving into a corrupt dictatorship that eventually collapsed back into capitalism, and that discredited the very idea of social-ism in the minds of millions.

Today, in 2011, despite the financial crisis of 2007-08, the continued attacks on living standards and welfare, the increasingly evident climatic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the influence of socialist ideas within both the working class and the population at large is the lowest it has been since the end of the nineteenth century — though there are a few green shoots here and there. What is clear, however, is that socialists must not fool themselves into thinking that the historical tide runs in their favour. Social-ist ideas can triumph, but this triumph is not historically determined; it has to be fought for.

Since 1914 there have been many revolutionary situa-tions and near-revolutions, to mention Europe alone — Germany 1918-23, Austria 1918 and 1934, Britain 1926, Spain 1936, Hungary 1918, France 1936, France, Italy and Belgium 1943-44, France 1968, Portugal 1970s. Yet in each case the revolutions aborted, were defeated (Hungary) or failed to materialise. Why? — if the working class was a potentially revolutionary as Marx argued.

Can these failures be explained by the absence of strong revolutionary parties, or mistakes of such parties where they existed, or the treachery of leaders? This is the stand-

free elections. On the contrary, socialists must strive to achieve

power through parliament as long as that possibility still exists and as long as the mass of the working class and the people still see parliamentary democracy as viable. At the same time,

they must prepare themselves and their supporters both psy-chologically and organisationally to meet and defeat these threats from reaction — and, in the process, radically democra-

tise the state machine.

ard argument of many comrades. Certainly there were mis-takes and even betrayals. But is this a sufficient explana-tion?

As an example of the reasons for failure let us look at the failed revolution of 1923 in Germany, where there exist-ed a powerful Communist Party. Its failure aroused consid-erable controversy within the Communist International and still does today. Trotsky attacked the leadership of the Comintern and the leadership of the German Communist Party for failing to take advantage of favourable circum-stances in October to launch an insurrection and seize power. Others argued that the Anglo-French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 and galloping inflation had created a revolutionary situation right up until August, but that after the downfall of the Cuno government in that month and its replacement by Stresemann’s government, the sta-bilisation of the currency and the granting of wage rises, the situation changed: ‘From then on with the workers in retreat, the economic and political situation improv-ing, and the government prepared, all the objective fac-tors ran counter to the idea of seizing power.’ (Revolu-tionary History, Volume 5, no 2, p 8) On the other hand, Trotsky argued that the situation was still revolutionary in October.

I am not concerned with who was right. In New Inter-ventions (Volume 3, no 2, 1992) I wrote:

The point is that the mood of the working class can fluctuate so rapidly, that it can ebb and flow so rap-idly under the influence of secondary conjunctural factors.

Germany in 1923 is only one instance among many. So much so that Trotsky was impelled to gen-eralise these experiences as follows: ‘… every new sharp change in the political situation to the left places the decision in the hands of the revolutionary party. Should it miss the critical situation, the latter veers around to its opposite… the words of Lenin to the effect that two or three days can decide the fate of the international revolution have only too often been confirmed and, with the exception of the Oc-tober, always from the negative side.’ (The Third In-ternational After Lenin, p 83) What does this imply about the revolutionary consciousness of the work-ing class? That — despite Marx’s words about what ‘it is historically compelled to do’ — its ‘irrevocably prescribed action’ can only be relied on for two or three days at infrequent intervals, and that success on these rare occasions depends on the revolu-tionary party recognising the situation in time and getting everything right. So far, only an ad-vanced minority of the working class has at any time attained a generalised socialist conscious-ness — an understanding of the necessity for social-ism — strong enough not to be abandoned as a re-sult of secondary and temporary changes in the im-mediate situation…

Consequently, the periods during which it has been possible for Leninist-type parties to seize pow-er have been short-lived and infrequent. Moreover, as soon as the revolutionary regime is unable to de-liver the goods (due to blockades, attempts at de-stabilisation, civil war and intervention by capitalist


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powers), the working class, in the absence of this deep socialist consciousness, is likely to turn against the revolutionary regime. This is what happened in Russia. I am not condemning the Bolsheviks for seizing power. They had every reason to expect that the Russian Revolution would spread to Germany and Western Europe, and it is easy for us to be wise with hindsight. What I am saying is that the seizure of power before the working class as a whole, or a sufficiently large section of it, has attained a gener-alised socialist consciousness deeply implanted enough to sustain the regime through the inevitable early period of difficulties presents serious prob-lems, and these are directly related to the political consciousness of the working class and the general cultural level of society.

Let me do some mathematical prediction. Earlier in this article I listed all the possible revolutionary or near-revolutionary situations occurring in Europe since 1914. There were 10 in all. Let us say 12 in case I have missed any out. A total of 12 short-lived occasions during which it might have been possible for a revolutionary party to come to power. On some of these occasions such a party existed in sufficient strength (Germany 1923) but failed to take ad-vantage due to errors. On other occasions such a party was extremely weak (Britain 1926); on other occasions (Spain 1936, France 1968) the main working-class parties were so-cial reformist or Stalinist. Even in Russia in 1917 the Bolshe-vik party nearly let the opportunity slip. It was only Lenin’s frantic efforts that prodded a reluctant Central Committee to go ahead. Given all the conditions necessary for success — both subjective and objective — the odds against all being met were probably one in 10. According to this — admittedly speculative — calculation we can expect a suc-cessful revolution in any country once every 120 years! And then it would have to be followed fairly quickly by sister revolutions in several other countries.

The conclusion to be drawn from all this history is that if we rely purely on action from below the chances in the foreseeable future of socialist or communist parties achiev-ing power — and holding on to it — in a number of coun-tries simultaneously are very slim. However before we abandon the struggle in despair and sink into fatalism let us see if there is anything missing in the Leninist-Trotskyist perspectives I have described. Yes there is! There is the pos-sibility of the pressure from below — the pressure of revolu-tion — being reinforced by reform from above, from within the existing state apparatus, as a response to the threat of complete social breakdown.

The Possibility of Reform from Above —

Bonapartism Revisited

It is on this question that I definitely part company with ‘orthodox’ Marxism. But I do so with some trepidation. Just as I have accused Marxists of unwarranted optimism about the revolutionary potential of the working class, so I may be accused of unwarranted optimism about the possibility of reform or restructuring from above. On what do I base this optimism if such it is?

The possibilities arise from the dual nature of the state machine. Marxism defines the state as the instrument of the ruling class — its core being ‘bodies of armed men’ and

its role the preservation of the dominance of the ruling class. But the state is more than just that, as acknowledged even by Marx and Engels. In a society riven by class and ethnic conflict and even by the struggle of each against each, a structure must arise above these conflicting classes, groups and individuals in order to prevent these conflicts leading to chaos. This organism is the state; it must set the rules of conduct, a framework of laws which make possible the production of things to satisfy material needs and rela-tively peaceful relations between individuals and classes. The role of the state in modern society is to ensure that the above-mentioned conflicts are carried out according to certain rules (laws) that make possible the functioning of society — in this case a capitalist society. Marxists recog-nise this role and that in some situations the state rises above classes, balances between classes and becomes rela-tively independent. Marx famously pointed to Louis Bona-parte III’s regime, following his coup d’état in 1851 as bal-ancing between classes and the bourgeoisie accepting his rule as the price of order enabling them to continue profit-able investment. This phenomenon of the state becoming independent of any class and balancing between them has since been called ‘Bonapartism’ by Marxists. However, many Marxists see this as an exceptional situation and not the norm.

I would argue that there is an element of Bonapartism permanently present and that Marxists underestimate the autonomy of the state and its ability to act independently of the capitalist class per se. I have previously given examples of this — Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, wartime plan-ning and state direction of the economy in Britain and Germany (also mentioned by Lenin).2

Another factor making it possible to envisage structural changes to capitalism coming from within the establish-ment is the difference in functions between the capitalists themselves — the bankers and directors of capitalist firms on the one hand and professional politicians and civil serv-ants on the other. The job of the former is to run their banks and businesses and maximise profit; they do not di-rectly run the state, make political decisions and draft laws. This is left to politicians and their civil servants and advis-ers. In so far as they are not individually corrupt — in the pay of or personally profiting from a particular business —

2. Let us mention a negative example. Did the German capitalists directly control the Nazi Party in the Third Reich? Was the

Nazi Party nothing but a creation of the German capitalist class? Hardly. The Nazi Party from its formation was supported and financed only by a few maverick businessmen; the bulk of

German businessmen supported the other bourgeois politi-cians and originally looked with disfavour on the Nazi thugs who disrupted order and hampered trade. It was only later

that, faced with the impotence of the bourgeois parties and the communist threat, they accepted Nazi rule as a defence against revolution. Of course once the Nazis were in power there was a

convergence of interest. The Nazi élite cosied up to big busi-ness and capitalist enterprises were grateful to the Nazis for suppressing the trade unions. But it would be wrong to say that

the Nazi state was ‘an instrument of the ruling class’ or that Germany’s going to war in 1939 was a decision taken by Ger-man big business, rather than an implementation of Nazi ide-

ology. That German enterprises used slave labour and profited from the plundering of the conquered territories does not alter that fact. The Third Reich could be described as another in-

stance of Bonapartism.


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their job is to enable the smooth running of the economy and maintain social order without which profitable invest-ment is difficult. So when the economy is threatened with meltdown due to either market forces or the mistakes of bankers, or a combination of both, the politicians and the state have to intervene in the economy. This is what hap-pened in the banking crisis of 2007-08. Governments stepped in and nationalised banks to prevent their collapse and financial meltdown. It is unfortunately true that they did this in such a way that they subsidised the bankers’ profits and bonuses and saddled the state with debts and deficits — justifying attacks on public services and welfare, pensions and wages. And they did not take the opportunity offered by these bank bailouts completely to reform the banking system and make the banks the servants of the people rather than their exploiters. The reason they failed to do so had nothing to do with inability; the British, French, German and American states had the power to draft laws and the physical force to impose them (and, let us add, the support of the rest of society) if they had done so. The reason they did not do so was ideological. These poli-ticians, both bourgeois and Labour (in Britain) acted or failed to act because they were tied to neo-con and neo-liberal views on the need for minimum interference with market forces — on the ability of these market forces to work efficiently with minimum interference. Of course there is also corruption both subtle and indirect. Politicians hold shares in enterprises, have relatives and friends in the fi-nancial and business world; on leaving political office many find lucrative positions in businesses where their familiarity with political processes and continuing contacts opened many profitable doors. There is also the tremendous pres-sure of the right-wing media and professional lobbying (rampant in the USA).

But even all this does not preclude the possibility (not inevitability) of support for structural reforms and curbs on capitalism arising within the corridors of power, among politicians and their advisers — if only to ensure their con-tinuation in office. One should not expect this when things are running relatively smoothly. But in circumstances when social breakdown as a result either of economic crises, envi-ronmental disasters and social disorder or a combination of these is imminent and the functioning of capitalism itself is at risk, is this not a possibility? The recognition even among our rulers that the existing system cannot continue as it is and needs radical reform? Did not Marx himself say that in certain circumstances of acute class struggle and crisis even a portion of the ruling class would break ranks and come over to the revolution?

All or nearly all socialists are convinced that the contin-ued existence of capitalism and of uncontrolled exploita-tion of natural resources will bring about worsening climat-ic disasters, floods, desertication, famines, mass migrations, etc, fuelling social disorder. Add to this economic instabil-ity and you have all the conditions for mass unrest and the possibility of radical socialist/communist parties winning sufficient support to aim for power. In other words, revolu-tionary situations. But, as I argued above, if we look only at the situation from below, from the point of view of the Len-inist-Trotskyist perspectives I outlined above, without tak-ing into account the possibility of movements from within the corridors of power, the chances of success against a united ruling class are slim.

Opening the Gates From Within?

To illustrate my point, imagine that society is a citadel, occupied and defended by a pro-capitalist garrison. It is besieged from outside by an army of workers and oppressed led by socialist officers. The garrison is well armed, the for-tress walls are strong. Only the hard core of the besieging army is disciplined and reliable. The morale of the rest fluc-tuates up and down, influenced by a variety of secondary factors; only at irregular intervals are they willing to storm the fortress, and the (communist) general staff of the be-sieging army is not always able correctly to gauge the mo-rale of their troops, the correct moment to launch an at-tack. The chances of success seem remote.

But then a new factor appears. The more farsighted of the garrison realise that even if the besieging army cannot break in it will not melt away, and they see the conditions in the besieged fortress have become intolerable. They in-sist on negotiations and threaten to open the gates to the besiegers after reaching a compromise on how the citadel is to be run. The besiegers do not get all they want — that the citadel now be run on strict socialist lines — but get struc-tural reforms, partial socialism.

Structural Reforms as the First Step to Socialism

What sort of compromise, what sort of interim measures are possible? Here again I must refer the reader to what I have previously written. I have argued that one of the key demands in any programme must be the complete restruc-ture of the global financial systems — the taking of the banks into state ownership and the vesting of all decisions on major investment, both nationally and internationally, in a publicly-accountable planning body. This would make it possible both to avoid or mitigate cyclical economic cri-ses and make possible the necessary large-scale investment in renewable and green energy — solar voltaic panels in desert regions, wind farms, the development of tidal and wave power — and soil preservation measures, anti-flood defences. All these necessary measures are hampered by lack of long-term investment and the drive for short-term profitability.

This restructuring of the financial system, this planned control of investment flows, even if the enterprises so fi-nanced remained in private ownership and worked within market mechanisms, would be a great step forward. There is already potential support for such an approach among climate scientists and even among economist experts who see the necessity for a radical restructuring of global and national financial systems. In a recent article in the Guardi-an the Nobel prize-winning, internationally well-known economist, Joseph Stiglitz, had this to say:

The answer… is simple: resume global growth… Re-storing growth requires that all governments that have the capacity to expand aggregate demand do so… Both the US and China need structural changes, not just a readjustment of exchange rates. Even in the short run, there is much they could do to con-tribute to global aggregate demand: increase wages for example. Both need investments to adapt to glob-al warming. Both need increased public spending on education and health for the poor. This alternative rests on cooperation — mutual commitments to fis-cal expansion, structural reforms… A new global re-


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serve system or an expansion of IMF ‘money’… [My emphases — HR]

Is it not possible that faced with mounting problems and imminent disaster more and more even ‘bourgeois’ politi-cians and their advisers and civil servants may accept the need for structural reforms? Socialists should not dismiss the possibility of a convergence between socialists and pro-test movements from below and pro-reform initiatives from within the power structure.

The restructuring proposed above would be both a re-form of capitalism and a step on the road to a socialist transformation of society.3

It is in such a convergence of

struggle from below and restructuring reforms from above that the best possibilities for social change will be found.

Winning the Battle of Ideas

I have mentioned above that one of the reasons govern-ments have failed to take the opportunity given by the col-lapse of banks during the recent meltdown to restructure radically the whole system was the dominance of pro-capitalist, pro-market, anti-intervention ideology. The fact that there was not in place an alternative ideology in socie-ty generally meant that pressure for an alternative was weak not only among the masses but also within the estab-lishment. This why it is important for socialists to win the ideological battle. Today the influence of socialist ideas both among the working class and among intellectuals is weaker than it has been at any time in the last century; it has not recovered from the damage done by the experience of Stalinism and the failures of social democracy. This must be righted and a climate of opinion favourable to socialist and radical ideas must be worked for not only within the working class but within other classes and especially among what I would call ‘social technocrats’ — scientists (especial-ly climate scientists), economists, civil servants, academics (often called on to become advisers to politicians).

What is needed today is something similar to the Fabi-an Society of the early twentieth century. It created the intellectual powerhouse that permeated the labour move-ment with socialist and progressive ideas and contributed to the victory of Labour in 1945 and the postwar reforms in Britain and Europe. They were of course not the only fac-tors and they could have had better teeth on many occa-sions. What we need today is something like a modern and stronger Fabian Society dedicated to promoting socialist ideology both in the working-class movement and outside it. I am not sure the comrades associated with the Towards a New International Tendency (Tanit) forum would like to see themselves compared with Fabians in this way, but the discussions they have initiated and their attempt to break away from the sectarianism and dogmatism of existing far-left sects and their eagerness to integrate themselves within existing movements can be likened to a modern Fabianism. Publications such as New Interventions also contribute to the flow of ideas.

3. There is no reason why socialists should not then press for

further steps towards socialism — the transfer of ownership of the means of production to cooperative or social ownership, democratisation of the state machine, increasing self-

government of localities and communities, etc.

Oded Pilavsky

Who Am I?

Towards any anti-Semite, I am a Jew To adherents of Greater Israel, a Palestinian

To white supremacists, I am black In face of rampant Israeli nationalism, I am a diaspora Jew

To Jewish megalomania, a gentile For European Neo-Nazis, let me be an Arab, a Turk and a

Kurd To Xenophobes, a migrant worker

To women haters, a feminist In the presence of aristocrats, I am a commoner

And with smug generals, a conscientious objector

* * *

Oded (Odik) Pilavsky

Odik was, for many years, my comrade in struggle and a dear personal friend. When we were still members of the Israeli Communist Party, he was known to me as a fearless fighter for the interests of the working class, both immedi-ate and historical interests – namely, for the future of hu-manity as a whole; for a just, equal and free society, with-out exploitation and oppression.

It was therefore no accident that when Akiva Orr and I looked for partners for establishing a new socialist organi-sation (which was eventually known as Matzpen), he was the first person we contacted. We discovered that he too was looking for partners for a road leading in the same direction.

Since that meeting, in the spring half a century ago, I was privileged to know him well personally. I loved him as a friend. Now the purest, most courageous and most honest heart I have ever known has stopped beating.

More than any other comrade, he embodied Matzpen’s political road.

Some define Matzpen as an ‘anti-Zionist organization’. This is misleading. Of course, we have struggled uncom-promisingly against Zionist ideology and practice. But for us this was not the point of departure, but a necessary conse-quence of our revolutionary socialist, internationalist posi-tion. The journal Matzpen, of which Odik was editor, carried the sub-heading ‘A Workers’ Monthly’.

These values found their concentrated expression in Odik’s personality and activity. He was proud of his work-ing-class origin (his father was a worker in the Dead Sea Potash industry) and of his belonging to this class. He was a leader of workers’ struggles — not an appointed leader, but one who emerged from the ranks, in the course of the struggle itself.

His death has deprived us of a friend and comrade; and the socialist movement in Israel, the region and the world has lost a rare personality, a first-rank fighter for a better world.

We shall cherish his memory, and continue along his path. Moshé Machover


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Arthur Trusscott

Ten Years On The Historical Significance of Al Qaeda

DDRESSING the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq War in January 2010, Tony Blair said that al Qaeda’s devastat-

ing attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 had changed everything in respect of his attitude towards Saddam Hussein and the threat that he, according to Blair, posed to Britain and the world in gen-eral. This was a truly staggering non sequitur — Ba’athist Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda — yet Blair was merely restating, if in a rather bizarre, very dis-honest and clearly self-serving manner, what has become a truism in much of Western thinking: that the actions of al Qaeda on that day signalled a fundamental change in glob-al politics.

And yet did it really do so? The assassination in Paki-stan of Osama bin Laden by US troops in May left me with a rather odd sensation. At a time when the often ill-mannered debate about the place of Islam in the Western world crashes on without any sign of abatement, when virulent anti-Muslim sentiments are the central mobilising axis of Britain’s latest fascist group and Europe’s far-right parties and constitute the weltanschauung of hordes of right-wing commentators and Norway’s murderous ‘Justici-ar Knight’ Anders Behring Breivik, with Islamist violence continuing in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and with Islamist currents lurking in the back-ground behind the mass unrest of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, at the time of his death bin Laden nonetheless seemed an almost passé figure, an incongruous face from the past.

What is al Qaeda?

Although al Qaeda burst into public consciousness through its demolition of the World Trade Center 10 years ago, it had been around for a while before that. Precise details are vague and often contradictory, but it appears that bin Lad-en, thoroughly committed to an extremely austere brand of Sunni Islam elaborated by the Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb and dedicated to struggling for its propagation through violent means, and having travelled to Pakistan in 1979 to join the Islamist guerrilla war against the radical regime in Kabul, formed the group in the late 1980s. Alt-hough it seems that the rumours that the CIA funded bin Laden are unfounded (as is the tale that he supported Ar-senal Football Club), he certainly took advantage of West-ern policies in Afghanistan, where the exigencies of the Cold War led to Western powers sponsoring violent Islam-ist groups. Irrespective of the matter of its receiving actual CIA or other state backing, al Qaeda was a beneficiary and indeed a by-product, if unintended, of Western foreign policy.

Returning to his homeland of Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden’s preoccupation with the presence of US troops that were stationed there from 1990 led to his becoming a public em-barrassment to the Saudi regime (although he continued to receive support from within the Saudi élite), and he settled in Sudan in 1992, moving on to Afghanistan in 1996, which was also the year in which he declared war against the USA. Al Qaeda’s actions at this time were largely small-scale op-erations within Muslim countries, and the organisation offered assistance and advice to various Islamist forces in the Middle East and North Africa. Al Qaeda was also involved in the Balkans during the collapse of the Yugo-slav federation, and bin Laden was even provided with a Bosnian passport. Its first large-scale attack upon US inter-ests was the bombing of the US embassy in Kenya in Au-gust 1998, which caused considerable damage and loss of life.

The events of 11 September 2001 were followed by bombings in Bali in October 2002, resulting in 202 people being killed; Istanbul in November 2003, 57 killed; a ferry in the Philippines in February 2004, 116 killed; London in July 2005, 56 killed; Amman in November 2005, 60 killed; and a whole series of bombings and other attacks in Iraq since August 2003 causing many thousands of deaths. Al Qaeda was not directly involved in the train bombing in Madrid in March 2004 which killed 191 people, but those responsible were inspired by the organisation. Many other plots have been unearthed by the authorities before coming to frui-tion, although some of them were the ravings of fantasists, and others were highly unlikely to have worked, such as the plot discovered in Britain to blow up simultaneously several airliners with home-made chemical concoctions. Altogeth-er, al Qaeda has been able to mount destructive operations in many countries around the world, and has been able to attract active support from and obtain the participation of albeit small numbers of Islamists in the heart of the imperi-alist countries themselves.

Al Qaeda’s programme has both minimum and maxi-mum aspects. The former includes the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia (which has been achieved) and other Muslim countries, the overthrow of the puppet Arab regimes (which are seen as traitors to Islam), and a solution to the problem of Palestine (which, noting bin Laden’s im-precations against ‘the Jews’, will not be a democratic one). Its intention has long been to inveigle the USA into a costly war of attrition in the Islamic world which would thereby weaken the US economy, and one might venture that it has had some degree of success in respect of this. The maxi-mum aspect of its programme is basically the establishment of a global caliphate, a world based upon Islamic — or, ra-

A


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ther, its specific brand of Islamic — values. Its statements on social issues are incorrigibly conservative, although it is only fair to add that fundamentalist Christians and Jews would happily concur with quite a few of them. And, show-ing some sensitivity to Western fashions, it also raises some environmental issues in its statements. Al Qaeda has always lacked any sort of transitional method to go from its mini-mum to its maximum demands, and, as we shall see, it lacks any capacity to become a mass organisation in most parts of the world.

Al Qaeda is an unusual organisation in that it is simul-taneously heavily ideologically centralised and operational-ly decentralised. This has been one of its strengths. On the one hand, it revolves around its necessarily secretive lead-ership, and it is probably the ultimate leadership-cult or-ganisation, with, as far as one can tell, no structure that can allow ideological challenges to the leadership from below, or even any basis for ideological debate. At the same time, the very lack of ideological debate within the group as a result of the skimpiness of its programme and its ultra-centralised nature means that it can operate in a remarka-bly decentralised manner. With a strict conformity more or less guaranteed around a simplistic core ideology, al Qaeda’s leadership effectively endorses and then funds or rejects acts of violence proposed by adherents around the world.

Al Qaeda’s strictly terroristic approach — both on a tac-tical and a strategical level — prevents it from being any-thing other than a very narrow cadre organisation working in the strictest clandestinity, the only exceptions being in places where it can forge some sort of alliance with national Islamist groups — as it has done in Yemen and Somalia — or fundamentalist Sunni regime — as in Afghanistan — or in countries where Sunni Islam has a substantial presence and where there is massive societal collapse, as in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. However, its alliances with Islamist groups and regimes are often fragile and short-lived, as its partners tend to be parochially-minded and less interested in global jihad than fighting for local concerns on their own patch. The members of al Qaeda’s ‘International Brigade’ are often seen by local Islamists, let alone by ordinary Sunni Muslims, as bothersome foreigners. Having no solid na-tional base — that is, being unable to establish more than fleeting alignments with any nation-state — puts al Qaeda at a distinct disadvantage. Even at the height of its success, the possibilities of its obtaining more than a tiny degree of support amongst Muslims outwith devastated and benight-ed Sunni areas were extremely slim. The vast majority of Muslims not only in such metropolitan countries as Britain but also in countries that are officially defined as Muslim, such as Pakistan, were and remain strongly opposed to al Qaeda and its philosophy and activities.

The future of any organisation that revolves around a charismatic leader is inevitably put into question should that leader die or, as with bin Laden, is assassinated. It re-mains to be seen whether Ayman al-Zawahiri is able to step fully into bin Laden’s shoes. As it is, although al Qaeda could well continue to engage in its terrorist activities, bin Laden’s death and the matter of the succession, the inabil-ity of the organisation to cause any long-lasting impact within the metropolitan centres, its inability to build any sort of base beyond a few devastated countries, and the continued attrition at the hands of the authorities mean

that it is highly unlikely to match what it achieved in and immediately after 2001.

Al Qaeda and US Foreign Policy

Although the US authorities had become deeply concerned about al Qaeda prior to 11 September 2001, its spectacular attack upon the USA on that day led to a major shift in the form — if not the actual content — of US foreign policy. On the next day US President George Bush announced a ‘War on Terror’ against terrorists and those who harboured them. Rejecting the offer by the Afghan government to hand over bin Laden if the US authorities could provide evidence of his involvement in the 11 September attacks (he denied at that point that he was involved, although he sub-sequently did), US and UK forces attacked Afghanistan on 7 October, starting a war and occupation and ensuing violent resistance that continue to this day. More importantly, this occupation has greatly exacerbated instability in neigh-bouring Pakistan, a situation that is itself largely a product of problems in Afghanistan predating the US invasion, in which violence on the part of often officially-supported Islamist groups links in with a longstanding quarrel with India in respect of Kashmir. This unintended by-product of intervening in Afghanistan has serious implications that cannot be easily solved in this grossly unstable and nuclear-armed country.

Al Qaeda’s attack also gave Bush and his sinister foreign policy team the excuse to put into action their broad plans for reasserting US power across the Middle East and the Eurasian landmass as a whole. Within the context of the growing international power vacuum accompanying the decline and demise of the Soviet Union, the USA had long seen Iraq as central factor in its quest for influence in the Middle East, as its gaining control of Iraq would result in its obtaining a commanding position across the region. That is why the replacement of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s fiercely independent dictator, with a more pliable ruler was an ob-session with successive US Presidents.

With a mendacity that was equal to any of Hitler’s rant-ings about the threat posed to Germany by Poland and Czechoslovakia, Bush and his British amanuensis Tony Blair campaigned vigorously for war against Iraq, shame-lessly linking Saddam’s regime with al Qaeda, despite the fact that Ba’athism was a deadly enemy of Islamism and dealt with it in a robust manner, and making out that Iraq, weakened by a decade or more of Western sanctions, posed a deadly military threat not merely to its neighbours, but to faraway Britain.

The US–UK invasion of Iraq in March 2003 led to an immediate governmental and societal collapse, mass inter-necine sectarian slaughter and expulsions, gangster parties and cliques gaining local and regional power, and, through the election of Shia parties, providing Iran, another of the USA’s bogeymen, with a not inconsiderable foothold in the country. It also gave — and how about this for an irony of history? — a grand opportunity for al Qaeda to set up a local franchise in the Sunni areas, which then instituted its own reign of terror against both non-Sunnis and Sunnis not disposed towards their austere brand of Islam. Eight years down the line, Iraq is still lacking any national coherence and indeed any coherent national government, and the local branch of al Qaeda is still in operation.

On the home front, the events of 11 September 2001 led


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to drastic attacks upon civil liberties, and led to Muslims as a whole being suspected by the authorities and amongst the general public of being at the least sympathetic to Islamism and at the worst surreptitious supporters of al Qaeda. The increased state surveillance of Muslims and the establish-ment of the Guantánamo prison camp where hurriedly-arrested and dubiously-selected Muslims from especially Afghanistan were imprisoned in inhuman conditions not only was a travesty of legal processes, but played into the hands of Islamism by alienating wide numbers of Muslims, in the same way as internment in Northern Ireland rein-forced rather than undermined Republican sympathies. Suspicion of Muslims continues: only recently, a Muslim student at Nottingham University researching Islamist movements was arrested after the college authorities in-formed the police that he had downloaded an al Qaeda document from an official US website.

Yes, in a certain way, the events of 11 September 2001 did change everything. The US–UK invasions of Afghani-stan and Iraq were a response to al Qaeda’s attack on the USA. But they were policy options, and other policies were available to the USA’s political leadership. It did not have to order the invasions, and the results have been two massive own-goals for US imperialism. These policies have seriously set back the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East and the world as a whole, and instead of usefully exploiting the window of opportunity afforded by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it lost much goodwill in the Middle East, gave China a very useful breathing space in which to start chal-lenging the USA on a world scale, and finally wasted a vast amount of US money: according to the Cost of War web-site, the two wars have so far cost over 1.2 trillion dollars, increasing by over $300 000 every minute of the day.

Al Qaeda declared that it wished to pull the USA into a ruinously expensive quagmire by having it invade a Muslim country. Washington was not obliged to fall headlong into this trap, it took a conscious decision to do so. Nor was London obliged to follow; this was the decision of the New Labour government.

Foreign policy decisions can also have serious domestic consequences. It was Blair’s decision to support Bush that encouraged four British al Qaeda adherents to kill them-selves and 52 underground and bus passengers in London on 7 July 2005. One cannot say whether al Qaeda would not have staged an atrocity in Britain had its government not blindly followed the USA. But one can be sure that Blair’s decision to back Bush made such an appalling act a certain-ty.

Domestic Consequences

An old trick favoured by hard-line religious campaigners is to invite a certain level of hostility towards their particular denomination in the hope that this will help to bring back to the fold those drifting away from a fervent adherence towards an accommodation to the surrounding more liber-al social norms. A state of siege, however unpleasant the ensuing consequences, gives the hard-liners a better chance to assert their hold over their flock than they would in a genuinely liberal society in which, especially, the younger members of the denomination might be tempted to exper-iment with new-fangled ideas and practices, and start to challenge the tenets and fetishes of the religion and the authority of the clergy. One of the consequences of Islamist

terror in both Islamic and secular metropolitan countries, and one of which bin Laden must have been well aware, although this is (not entirely unsurprisingly) absent from the al Qaeda statements that I have perused, has been to alienate Muslims from other people, and to create a climate of suspicion of and hostility towards Muslims, in order to draw them in anger or despair towards supporting the more obscurantist and austere interpretations of their religion.

Bin Laden was pushing at an opening door. By the end of the last century, hostility to Muslims was already well established in Western countries. What is popularly if not entirely accurately known as Islamophobia is a develop-ment of and variation upon the racist sentiments long prevalent in the metropolitan centres. Rather than broadly targeting black and Asian people as ‘alien’, it directs popu-lar hostility towards Muslims, and it is essentially a calcu-lated reactionary response to the rise of a Muslim identity — or, more accurately, Muslim identities — and of militant forms of Muslim politics in the world at large and in West-ern countries in particular. Although of a different brand of Islam to that which bin Laden claims to represent, the es-tablishment of the Shi’a Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 showed the potential posed by an obscurantist Islamic movement. From the early 1970s, Sunni Islamist move-ments had been making steady progress in Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries in response to the political bankruptcy and general failings of secular movements and regimes. In the light of the repeated warnings of the dan-gers posed by Islamism, it is of course ironic that Islamist currents — for example, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — often received covert support from Western powers. But they were seen as a useful counterweight to radical move-ments and regimes. The Saudi Arabian government (anoth-er good friend of Western imperialism) devoted considera-ble amounts of its oil revenues to the funding of mosques and Islamic centres in Western countries that promoted ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam. The degree to which such ideas had crossed into and taken hold in West-ern countries became evident whilst bin Laden was still an obscure jihadist in Afghanistan with the furore that erupted during the late 1980s in respect of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. That the appearance of a largely incompre-hensible — and, one suspects, largely unread — book led to an outburst of virulent hatred against its author shows that an inflammable political mix had been brewing amongst Western Muslims for some time.

One of the key factors in assisting this development in many Western countries, including Britain, was the official ideology of multiculturalism. Although concocted as an attempt to deal positively with racial and religious divisions in society, it has done exactly the opposite. Through its attempts to ‘box’ everyone within a series of ethnic, nation-al and religious — but not class — criteria, it places people in a multitude of religiously, nationally and ethnically-defined identities, drives wedges between different ‘com-munities’, and tends to encourage the more conservative elements within each ‘community’ as the cultural and/or religious ideas and practices which mark off one ‘communi-ty’ from another are emphasised in the name of ‘diversity’.

The atmosphere that has seen a growing level of hostili-ty towards Muslims and an often angry discourse about the position of Islam within Western countries was solidly rooted long before September 2001. The chief result of al


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Qaeda’s activities has been the intensification and deepen-ing of anti-Islamic sentiments in Western countries.

However, the phenomenon of anti-Muslim sentiments does not merely represent the classic targeting and scape-goating by reactionaries of one or another group in society in order to divert people’s attention from factors — unem-ployment, worsening conditions of employment, housing shortages, cuts in public services, etc — that might elicit a militant class-based response. In many ways, anti-Islamic sentiments have replaced the anti-communism of the Cold War as a key defining ideological feature in the Western world. The ‘defence of freedom’ is now predicated upon holding back the forces of Islamic obscurantism as opposed to the now-redundant resistance to ‘totalitarian com-munism’. Western social norms are defined against the more austere versions of Islam — or, for the fervid right-wing ideologues and rabble-rousers, against Islam as a whole — in what has often been termed a ‘clash of civilisa-tions’. And like the anti-communism of the Cold War, anti-Islamic sentiments are not confined to the political right. Indeed, one might venture that there is a division of labour between liberals and conservatives on this issue: the former mobilise anti-Islamic sentiments under the banner of de-fending modern, secular norms, in particular women’s and gay rights and the right freely to criticise and satirise reli-gious dogmas, whilst the latter tend towards a more tradi-tional anti-alien approach, albeit larding this with a liberal coating whenever it is seen as handy. The appeal to modern norms also makes anti-Muslim ideas attractive to liberals in a way that anti-Semitism, with its pejorative portrayal of Jews as the carriers of modernity, and traditional white racism, with its assertions or implications of racial suprem-acy, could not do. The deliberately provocative obscu-rantism of not merely Islamist ideologues but also certain supposedly more ‘moderate’ Islamic spokesmen, although not necessarily more objectionable than statements by con-servative representatives of other religions, have long been helping to stoke up hostility to Islam as a whole. Once again, this predated al Qaeda’s debut on the world scene, and ruminations on this topic were appearing from the early 1990s. What bin Laden has done has been to exacer-bate the growing divisions between Islam and the rest of the world.

One new aspect in British politics has been the appear-ance of the English Defence League, an extreme right-wing group that claims to be merely opposed to extreme forms of Islam — that is, Islamism — but has demonstrated on vari-ous occasions to be hostile to Muslims as a whole, and, when sufficiently inebriated, to non-Muslim Asians as well. Although its open courting of football hooligans and de-light in rough-house tactics mark it off somewhat from the rather more genteel and more successful — and therefore ultimately more dangerous — anti-Islamic movements on the Continent, such as Geert Wilders and his Freedom Par-ty in Holland, the emergence of the EDL in Britain and an-ti-Muslim organisations elsewhere shows that the far right understands the potency of anti-Muslim sentiments as a key mobilising device. Although anti-Muslim sentiments were building up in Britain prior to September 2001, the emergence of the EDL in 2008 can to a fair degree be predi-cated upon the deadly activities of al Qaeda in New York in 2001 and, more so, in Britain four years later. Like al Qaeda and Islamists in general, the EDL wishes to drive a wedge

between Muslims and non-Muslims; the two rival currents feed off each other, and both are ready to use provocations and violence to do so.

Whilst it is a little unfair to hold al Qaeda directly re-sponsible for two negative and rival developments within the British left during the last decade, it cannot be denied that there was a connection between the formation of the Respect unity coalition and the launch of the Euston Mani-festo and the US response to 11 September 2001, and in par-ticular the invasion of Iraq 18 months afterwards. Each in its own way shows the inability on the part of left-wingers to deal with the rise of both Islamic politics and anti-Islamic sentiments.

Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the US-UK invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq could be found amongst rightward-moving radicals who, in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s attacks, saw something positive in Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, and felt that the Western occupation of these coun-tries would assist their populations by bringing to them the benefits of liberal democracy via the violent removal of the Taliban and Ba’athist regimes and their replacement by governments that would respect human rights and general-ly behave in a manner in line with Western sensibilities. Whether or not this current took the moniker of the ‘De-cent Left’ as a rather immodest self-description or adopted something which was originally aimed at it as a subtle in-sult, it justifies its openly pro-imperialist standpoint — most graphically outlined in the Euston Manifesto, but also via websites such as Harry’s Place — with an ill-mannered torrent of attacks upon left-wingers deemed soft on Islam or indeed who consider that imperialism is not part of the solution to the problems of the Middle East and beyond, but is very much central to the problem.

On the other hand, some elements on the left, noting the strong opposition to the war on Iraq on the part of Muslims in Britain, felt that some sort of alliance between their groups and Muslim organisations might pay off, not least after the monster anti-war march in February 2003, the biggest-ever demonstration in British history. In its wake, the Socialist Workers Party, fresh from evicting itself from the Socialist Alliance, launched the Respect unity campaign, a totally unprincipled lash-up between itself and a few left-wing small fry on the one hand, and sundry Mus-lim groups and individuals on the other. This necessitated a downplaying of certain longstanding left-wing positions concerning women’s and gay rights which would not go down too well with the more conservative of the Muslim groups which Respect was trying to court.

Respect did manage to get a Member of Parliament, the colourful opportunist George Galloway, and several local councillors elected, but the SWP gained next to nothing — people recruited to the far left from a Muslim background have customarily wanted to keep well away from their reli-gious roots, not to pander to them — and, somewhat alarmingly, lost quite a few senior cadres to its unprincipled offspring when the party finally disowned it. Furthermore, as the SWP lurched back towards a more class-based standpoint, the party leaders most responsible for the Re-spect fiasco sloped off with a few dozen members to create a Respect Mark II in Counterfire.

Once again, the events and the aftermath of September 2001 did not produce these manifestations ex nihilis. There had been a steady slide to the right on the part of quite a


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few radicals, and this was noticeable during the first war against Iraq in 1991 and especially during the civil wars that engulfed the collapsing Yugoslav federation shortly after-wards, when they started to call enthusiastically for West-ern military intervention on the grounds that it would have a civilising effect upon the Middle East and the Balkans. The newly-found positive assessment of the capabilities of imperialism and belief in Western liberal tenets are inextri-cably linked with their seeing such obscurantist trends as Islamism as a universal threat to humanity.1 On the other hand, sections of the far left have long been prone to adap-tation to all manner of quasi-radical forces and regimes so long as they appeared to be aiming their blows against im-perialism. Some Trotskyists had managed to discern pro-gressive aspects to the mullahs’ regime in Iran, so an adap-tation to Muslim political groups in Britain could hardly be ruled out. The only surprise in the Respect fiasco was that it was initiated by the SWP. This was a group that had under the judicious leadership of Tony Cliff customarily avoided such antics, only to fall ingloriously into the trap soon after his death in 2000.

Al Qaeda as a Catalyst

When one considers the terrifying televisual images of 11 September 2001, the suicide bombers on buses and trains and in holiday bars, the mayhem in North Africa, the Mid-dle East and beyond, and all the other aspects of al Qaeda’s campaign of terror, it is all too easy to view bin Laden and his group as having ‘changed everything’ in world politics. Yet, when viewed in the longer term, its historical legacy could well be seen in a somewhat different light.

Although some Palestinian youth in Gaza cheered when the World Trade Center collapsed, the unrest that saw Ha-mas come into prominence kicked off in late 1987, predat-ing the rise of al Qaeda. Although al Qaeda cadres were to be found with the Islamist forces in the civil war that wracked Algeria, these forces first went into overt opposi-tion to the Algerian regime in 1982, and the violence erupt-ed in 1992. In much of the Muslim world, Islamist move-ments were already in active existence well before bin Lad-en’s group appeared on the scene. The rise of both overt Muslim identities and anti-Muslim sentiments in the met-ropolitan centres also long predated the appearance of al Qaeda.

What bin Laden and al Qaeda have managed to do is to intensify and accelerate existing trends in society, in partic-ular the rise of anti-Islamic sentiments in Western coun-tries. Al Qaeda therefore has acted as a catalyst, driving on and ratcheting up processes that were already in existence. Bin Laden did not create either Islamist sentiments or broader Islamic self-definitions, but he keyed into existing phenomena. He did not spark off anti-Islamic prejudice, but he certainly speeded it up and intensified it, which is precisely what he intended to do. He, like any other reli-

1. We will not comment here upon the paradox that the fervent hatred of Islamism that is a central tenet of ‘Decency’ did not

prevent our pro-interventionists from carefully overlooking the presence with Western approval of al Qaeda cadres in the civil wars in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo, as the Serbs were

their bête noir there. Neither does the presence of violent Is-lamists in the opposition movement in Libya seem to worry liberal and left-wing supporters of Nato’s ‘humanitarian inter-

vention’ against Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.

gious zealot, knew that there is nothing quite like a bit of religious persecution to get the faithful rallying to the church or, in this case, the mosque. Al Qaeda’s blowing up an office block, a bus or train, or shooting up an hotel can-not destabilise any even halfway secure nation-state, but it can help to widen divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims, making the latter suspicious of the former, and making the former feel insecure in the presence of the lat-ter. Al Qaeda’s operations in the metropolitan centres also helped give the impression that there was a world-wide organisation of Islamist activists. Those Muslims attracted towards this austere brand of Islam now had a focus that enabled them to feel part of a global movement.

It has been ventured that al Qaeda managed to revive the fortunes of Islamism, which were considered to be on the wane a decade ago. There is some truth in this, alt-hough not a little of this revival has been the result of rash Western policies, most notably the invasions and occupa-tions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and these were the conscious decisions of the politicians concerned, who did exactly what bin Laden wanted them to do. It has also been ven-tured that Islamism has played little part in the unrest that has recently confronted various regimes in the Middle East. That is largely true, but Islamist currents remain lurking in the background, and they have previously flourished when more progressive political forces have failed.2

A Socialist Response

In the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, I set forward the following points that I felt that socialists should adopt. 1. Oppose imperialist interventions in Asia and the Middle

East. 2. Expose the anti-democratic manoeuvres and the spon-

sorship of terrorism on the part of imperialist regimes. 3. Make no concessions to any declared ‘civilising mission’

on the part of the imperialist powers; the masses of the region will not be liberated from backwardness through the armed might of the USA and its allies.

4. Make no concessions to religious fundamentalism, there is nothing progressive whatever about its opposi-tion to the West.

5. Oppose all attempts to whip up racism or anti-Islamic sentiments.

6. Oppose any attempt to restrict civil liberties. 7. Oppose any attempt by the ruling class to use the crisis

to attack workers’ jobs and living standards — class re-lations remain unchanged.

I see no reason to amend any of these basic points, they are as valid today as they were then. However, the posing of these points raises the particular question of how to ‘oppose all attempts to whip up… anti-Islamic sentiments’.

2. And of course, despite all the fulminations in the West against

extreme manifestations of Islam, Islamism remains as a poten-tial asset for imperialism should the big powers detect a threat to their interests in the actions of progressive forces in the re-

gion. Realpolitik leads to all manner of incongruous alliances. I would not be at all surprised that if in Egypt a de facto alliance between the military and the Islamists emerges in opposition

to the pro-democracy movement, then the big powers will turn a blind eye to any attempts on the part of such an alliance to suppress the latter should protests calling for democracy come

to be viewed as a threat to the regime.


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The most difficult question facing the left is that of dealing with religious and cultural freedom. Socialists have often been in the forefront of campaigns for women’s and gay rights, so how do we defend a religious group that is under attack when some of its prominent spokesmen open-ly and provocatively defend social practices and tenets that contravene modern thinking, and when the attack on this religion is often focused through a purported defence of modernity? On the one hand, socialists must reject the tendency of some liberal and even left-wing opponents of the anti-Islamic drive towards making concessions to or excuses for manifestations of religious obscurantism on the part of Muslim spokesmen that would be firmly rejected if they came from, say, Roman Catholic or Orthodox Jewish clergy; on the other, how does one pose a secular, socialist opposition to such manifestations without adding fuel to the fire of anti-Islamic prejudice? It is a difficult problem that defies ready answers; it does seem that opposing anti-Semitism and the subsequent anti-black, anti-Asian racism was considerably easier than dealing with the anti-Islamic sentiments of today.

This question urgently requires an answer, particularly in the light of the relentless right-wing attacks upon ‘multi-culturalism’. Those engaged in this quest vary considerably, from David Cameron’s desire for a British national culture that would include ‘moderate’ Muslims through to the fer-vid right-wing columnists and broadcasters for whom Islam as a whole represents an existential threat to Western soci-ety, and whose theories (despite their frantic denials) in-spire the extreme right, including Breivik in his murderous rampage against those whom he deemed responsible for a ‘Muslim-Marxist’ assault upon Western culture. Whilst there is nothing progressive about these right-wing rejec-tions of ‘multiculturalism’, that does not mean that the left should defend the official ‘multiculturalist’ ideas and poli-cies that have accentuated conservative cultural norms and

widened divisions amongst peoples defined to be of differ-ent ‘cultures’. Both trends are predicated upon a reaction-ary theoretical basis that sees human ‘cultures’ as immuta-ble, discrete phenomena. A universalist approach is neces-sary to cut across both right-wing monoculturalism and official multiculturalism, one that draws upon democratic and progressive ideas and experiences from around the world, and the left needs urgently to work out precisely what this entails.

Islamism has been a major factor in world affairs during the last few decades. Arising primarily in response to the failure of modernising trends, parties and regimes in Mus-lim countries, often sponsored and aided by imperialism as a counterweight to radical political currents or for reasons of realpolitik, it continues to have a considerable presence in the Islamic world, and has established more than just a foothold within the Muslim populations of the metropoli-tan countries. Al Qaeda was a late-comer on the scene, but through its high-profile terror attacks it has played an im-portant catalytic role in the spreading of Islamism, the in-tensification of anti-Muslim sentiments and the isolating of Muslims as a whole in many parts of the world. True, it has merely exacerbated already existing trends, but these trends have increasingly insidious and dangerous conse-quences.

As for the left, prior to 11 September 2001 it was experi-encing considerable difficulties in dealing with these trends. The catalytic role played by al Qaeda has made its mark here as well, if indirectly, and has made all the more pressing the vital task of elaborating a positive strategy that can on a theoretical and practical level challenge anti-Islamic sentiments and oppose the scapegoating of Mus-lims within an overall framework that can defend enlight-ened social concepts and practices and emphasise the pri-macy of class politics when dealing with the political and social problems of the day.

Terry Liddle

War on the Heavens The Rise of the New Atheism

LTHOUGH the phrase was coined in 2006 by Wired magazine, the New Atheism has been around a little

longer. Sam Harris published his The End of Faith in 2004. Upfront and aggressive, it is vastly different from the stolid offerings of the National Secular Society (founded in 1866), which was always more concerned with the separation of church and state rather than advocating atheism, and those of the British Humanist Association, so wet it drips. It is also vastly different from the revolutionary intellectuals like FA Ridley and self-educated workers who mounted rickety platforms to combine anti-religious propaganda with at-tacks on capitalism.

The New Atheism is very much science-based and ar-

gues that many supernatural claims can be scientifically tested. God, they say, is an hypothesis which has failed.

Among the nineteenth-century thinkers and scientists the religious hate are Marx, Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche. Now the New Atheists have been added to the list of hate objects.

There has been a long history of publishing atheist lit-erature by specialist publishers like the Freethought Pub-lishing Company, GW Foote and Co, the Rationalist Press Association and Watts. The Little Blue Books published by Haldeman-Julius were printed in prolific quantities. But most of this literature was read by people who were already convinced atheists. What the New Atheism has done is to

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take familiar ideas, brilliantly repackage them, get them published by mainstream publishers and expose them to millions who otherwise would never have seen atheist liter-ature.

The American exponents of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger, who combine physics with philosophy. The major British exponents are Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in their books God Is Not Great and The God Delusion, published in 2006. All are sophisticated, articulate intellectuals.

Hitchens, while a visiting professor in Liberal Studies at the New School in New York, is better known as a writer and po-lemicist. He is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and often appears in the American Free Inquiry (celebrating reason and humanity) published by the Council for Secular Humanism. This is a far better publication than the coffee-table New Hu-manist or the venerable Freethinker, which, despite its nominal independence, is the house journal of the NSS.

Hitchens, a fan of booze and fags, now has cancer of the oesophagus. The religious are contemplating a death-bed conversion. Ironically, this reinforces Hitchens’s disbelief in a god, who if he did exist would be a vicious sadist.

In an interview Andrew Anthony writes:

At heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic. He cut his teeth on dialectical materialism as a teenage Trotskyist, and it was the analytical method that eventually put paid to any allegiance to the political madness.

Hitchens was a member of the International Socialists, and while their sanity is not in doubt, their political methodol-ogy is. They have become apologists for political Islam. Hitchens has entered the camp of imperialism, supporting the war in Iraq. It ill-behoves a person who can support the slaughter of innocent Iraqis to criticise Orwell’s attitude to the arson of churches in the Spanish Revolution. Hitchens genuinely believes radical or jihadist Islam to be an existen-tial threat to civilisation. This is true, but it is no excuse for becoming a camp follower of imperialism. Supporting one tyranny against another does not bring freedom. In the case of Hitchens it undermines his argument against the tyranny of religion.

Richard Dawkins is a Professor for the Public Under-standing of Science at Oxford University. The strength of his argument for evolutionary science has earned him the nickname Darwin’s Rottweiler. Darwin himself was a closet agnostic awed by his wife’s piety. His meeting with Edward Aveling, who journeyed to Downe House, ended in mutual miscomprehension. He was peeved when Aveling dedicated The Student’s Darwin to him. The copy of the first volume of Capital which Marx sent to Darwin remained unread on his bookshelves.

Dawkins deals with religion as a form of child abuse, and the sadism and sexual perversion of teachers, many of them members of religious orders, in church schools is well known, despite attempts by the hierarchy to hush it up. He

tells how he enlisted the help of the therapist Jill Mytton to help children traumatised by religious sects. She herself had been terrified as a little girl by threats of Hellfire in the Exclusive Brethren. He calls them a more than usually more than odious sect. As traditional Christianity declines, with Anglican churches being often near-empty on a Sunday, and with the Catholics being hard put to find recruits for the priesthood, these sects rise to take its place. They are a smaller and nastier version of the original.

Dawkins addresses the old myth that Hitler and Stalin were atheists. Hitler was brought up as a Catholic and sup-pressed free-thought societies. The leader of the Deutsche Freidenker-Verband, Max Sievers, was beheaded for treason in 1944. Stalin, who trained for the Orthodox priesthood, was an atheist, although this didn’t stop him enlisting the help of the Church during the war. But as Dawkins put it, ‘there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutali-ty’. The Jehovah’s Witnesses complain about Stalin sending them to the Gulag camps as if they were the only victims.

Dawkins mentions Marx only once. Hitchens considers Marx a great and fallible essayist. He writes of the Marxism of his youth and his admiration for Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.

The New Atheism has the fundamentalists worried. The November 2010 issue of the odious Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine Awake asks: ‘Are Atheists On The March?’ Its idea of what atheists look like is hilarious — short hair, neat beards, with shorts and ties! The Witnesses crowed long and loud when in 2004 the academic Antony Flew moved from Atheism to Deism. Flew was a right-winger and a very arrogant and unpleasant person, yet the NSS and its then President, Barbara Smoker, fawned on him. The local Witnesses have told me that Satan is within me and I am dancing with the Devil! Like I should worry already!? The Witnesses ask: Is belief in a creator intrinsically harm-ful? Both myself and the New Atheists would answer with a resounding: ‘Yes!’

While the New Atheism provides an arsenal of ammuni-tion to hammer religion, to undermine the foundations of its mythology, it falls short in failing to describe or make an analysis of the ideological role played by religion in sustain-ing the alienated social relations of bourgeois society. For this one must turn to Marx and to Marxists like FA Ridley, who was President of the National Secular Society and edi-tor of the Freethinker, and John Keracher. Ridley wrote:

Once a Communist order was fully established, the twin foundations of religion, ignorance and fear, would be torn up by the roots. This is what today’s infidels and iconoclasts must do having mastered the proletarian science of the materialist conception of history which provides the intellectual tools for the task. Then will the holy books, hymn sheets and vestments be abandoned to the worms and mice, capitalists driven from the earth and gods from the skies.


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Andrew Coates

The Flight of the Intellectuals? A Look at Paul Berman’s Latest Book

HE phobia against secularists has passed the liberal dinner-party test. From Baroness Warsi, through the

Guardian Comments page, to the apparently Marxist Social-ist Workers Party, it has become acceptable to describe ‘anti-god-botherers’ as vulgar and insulting. Behind the New Atheists’ rationalism, the chattering classes say, lies a Eurocentric sense of superiority. Their criticism of Islam barely disguises racial prejudice. Failure to understand that ‘extremist’ Islamists are not representative of the faith, but individuals reacting to Western callousness and their own humiliation, is to draw close to the English Defence League. Enlightenment fundamentalism is not just bad taste. It is ‘new racism’, a cover for military imperialism, and an en-dorsement of Guantánamo Bay.

Guests at such soirées will find much to ruminate about in The Flight of the Intellectuals. Paul Berman describes himself as ‘pro-war and left-wing’ — a supporter of ‘human-itarian interventionism’. In Terror and Liberalism (2003) he described Islamism as an irrationalist mass movement. Against this totalitarianism, with its ‘mad platform’, Ber-man advocated a ‘third force’ that would defend human rights and build the basis of a liberal society across the Muslim world. It turned out that this force could be, albeit imperfectly, embodied by the overthrow of Saddam Hus-sein and the Allied military occupation of Iraq.

That one can be a militant secularist, a left-wing demo-cratic socialist, and strongly oppose both Islamism and American armed politics, tended to get forgotten in the confrontation between Berman’s ‘decent left’ and those who used ‘anti-imperialism’ to justify the kind of apology for Islamism sketched above.

Berman has continued his campaign against what he considers to be Islamist totalitarianism. Tariq Ramadan is the hook on which this extended pamphlet hangs: ‘The conventional wisdom looked on Tariq Ramadan as a long-awaited Islamic hero — the religious thinker who was go-ing, at last, to adapt Islam to the modern world.’ (p 26) His essay is a genuine contribution to the ‘central debate of our moment’. That is the ‘debate over Islamist ideas in the Western countries, and over the reluctance of journalists and intellectuals from Western backgrounds to grapple seriously with the Islamist ideas’ (p 11). Berman subjects Ramadan to a degree of hostile forensic examination only exceeded by Caroline Fourest’s Frère Tariq (2004). He dis-cusses the Rushdie affair, the Muhammad cartoons, and hostility to Israel. During this interrogation Berman tries to reveal a deeper complicity between Ramadan and the Is-lamist far-right. Some of his insights are illuminating, but that it is also riddled with contentious and wholly false claims cannot, nevertheless, be forgotten for an instant.

The Flight of the Intellectuals is not just a study of Ram-adan. Wrapped around Berman’s polemic is a favourite theme of his earlier writings: that the left, particularly the European left, and its liberal counterparts, has a congenital inability to stand up against totalitarianism. The recent past, when the continent was seized by the ‘mania’ of the extreme right and the Stalinist extreme left has left an in-delible imprint on its culture and politics. To the author it is, therefore, no coincidence that the European left has reacted to Islamism with a ‘string of bumbles, gaffes, timid-ities, slanders, miscomprehensions and silences’ (p 299). Like 1930s liberals unable to resist the appeal of the Popular Front, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have displayed complaisant understanding towards Ramadan and his co-horts, while taking it upon themselves to condescend to-wards liberal anti-Islamist Muslims and secularists like the Somali-born feminist and secularist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Una-ble to oppose Islamism seriously, many on the left today are de facto fellow-travellers of what they consider to be a ‘reli-giously-motivated social conscience’. Or as the Guardian’s Seamus Milne puts it, ‘religion can be an ally of radical so-cial change’.

The book is markedly more self-controlled than Terror and Liberalism. It tries to influence the battle of ideas rather than take sides in real combat. The Flight has been com-pared to Julien Benda’s Traison de clercs (1927/1947) But that does not take us far. It is definitely not a parallel to Benda’s critique of intellectuals who abandoned the need to ‘défendre les valeurs éternelles et désintéressées, comme la justice et la raison’ for the Nation and, Benda also noted, ‘dialectical materialism’. It is, as Elbert Ventura suggests, ‘less concerned with the betrayals or corruption of the in-tellectuals he excoriates than with what he claims to be their moral cowardice’. One aspect is their inability to con-front the links between Islamism and Nazism. Another, which is considerably more significant, is their alleged fail-ure to hold Islamism to democratic account.

Islam and Fascism

The Flight asserts that the left (both in the American liberal sense, and the European socialist one) is infected with wishful thinking. Ramadan is both symbol and reality of Islamism’s uncritical welcome on the part of some sections of that spectrum. Behind this lies something more lasting. The left remains haunted by the ghost of Third Worldism and its vision of Noble Savages of the South. Pascal Bruck-ner, whose opinions on ‘the racism of anti-racists’ are spread over many pages towards the end of the book, fa-mously criticised the left’s tendency to consider the ‘poor-est human beings in the poorest regions of the world’ as

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‘better than other human beings’ (p 269). Franz Fanon fa-mously believed that violence, combined with linguistic defiance, could help foster a sense of self-worth of the ‘wretched of the earth’ as they threw off the colonial yoke. During the 1960s and sometimes even later, progressives showed willingness to make excuses for all aspects of their revolts, at one time often citing such dubious psychology.

This ideology, one can observe, is much more recent than Stalinist fellow-travelling. In Le Lièvre de Patagonie (2009), Claude Lanzmann paints of a picture of Fanon which shows that he was to a degree detached from reality. He describes how he, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir of Les Temps Modernes in the 1960s concealed the ‘horreurs’ that the Algerian independence movement, the FLN, inflicted on opponents and dissidents, as they were above all ‘les plus malheureux de tous, victimes…’ (the worst of all, vic-tims). It would not take long to sift through Google to find contemporary excuses for, say, the ‘Maoist’ peasant revolu-tionaries in the Indian sub-continent. But by and large the fashion for covering up the violence of any political organi-sation has passed, as the cruelty of such acts is now visible to all through the touch of a keyboard.

Ramadan does not offer apologies for violent anti-colonial revolutions — there are none at present. Murder appears a feature of more sectarian battles, inter-ethnic and religious. It is perhaps rather easy to condemn terrorist violence in these conditions. In these conditions Ramadan gives no support for ‘anything even remotely resembling a violent campaign’ (p 182). The Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University has talked simply of dignity and seems to advocate simply the assertion of the rights of a European oppressed group. They should advance by:

… developing and protecting spiritual life in society, disseminating religious as well as secular education, acting for justice in every sphere of social, economic and political life, and finally, promoting solidarity with all groups of needy people who are forgotten or culpably neglected or marginalised. (Western Mus-lims and the Future of Islam, 2004)

These suggestions, as Berman notes, form a programme for ‘many agitations and protests’, not an armed uprising, still less random murder. This is a facile choice in favour of pa-cific politics: we rarely face genuine dilemmas in most countries where the only way one can oppose a tyrannical occupation or government is by force. The jihadist who launches a bloody struggle against the mere presence of the kufur is not difficult to condemn.

What then is the problem? To begin with, Tariq Rama-dan, now resident in the UK, is someone who can represent Islamism in a reasonable way, yet appeals to a dangerously edgy audience amongst Muslims. He is — or claims to be — ‘a man in touch with the Muslim masses, sociologically authentic, therefore politically progressive’ (p 181). That is the difficulty. For the latter, and for some of the former, he continues to extol the fight against Israel. He is opposed to ‘all Zionist colonisers. This phrase can only mean the Zion-ist population as a whole.’ To oppose them with violence is sacred, ‘armed resistance was incumbent’ (p 184). This is religious duty.

This obligation is equally, Berman argues, linked to a living past. Ramadan is, Berman asserts, for all his liberal

gestures, deeply indebted to the totalitarian battlements of Islamism. He retains a pious reverence towards his grandfa-ther, Hassan al-Banna, about whom he wrote an admiring doctoral dissertation. Liberals and the left, who accept Ramadan’s claim to ‘modernise Islam for a liberal age’ and the Islamist wish to conquer ‘a share of the public space’ should recognise this source. The streetwise Ramadan is full of admiration for the Yusif al-Qaradawi, an Islamic fig-ure of considerable authority, who very explicitly endorses ‘martyrdom operations’ against the Jewish state. The diffi-culty with Ramadan is that the tradition he comes from is ‘without any kind of natural barrier between its pro-terrorists and its anti-terrorists’ (p 203).

Behind this, The Flight argues, is a lingering complicity with fascism. That is, with the ideological network laid down by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during his collabora-tion with the Nazis during the Second World War. Berman spends a great deal of time going over some well-trodden paths, about the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, about the founder of contemporary radical Islam, Qutb, and the far-right facets of their ideologies. The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Hafiz and Hassan al-Banna (creator of the Egyp-tian Muslim Brotherhood and Ramadan’s forbearer) are called to account. The former collaborated with Nazis: ‘In the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism are very close.’ (p 80) The latter had ‘a politics of not just of ultra-conservative communitarian obedience but of vio-lence and war’ (p 45). The main charge against Ramadan is that he is excessively deferential towards his ancestor:

The remarkable omission in Ramadan’s book about his grandfather, then — the discreet shrinking of al-Banna’s alliances with the mufti to a mere two sen-tences, the silence on the mufti’s calls for genocide and his wartime role, the silence on al-Banna’s ad-miration for Hitler… (p 121)

Berman focuses largely on the Islamists’ picture of ‘diaboli-cal’ Jewry. This is a strong tie with National Socialism. But in many other respects, one would observe, the search for an ‘organic’ society, where right and God are united for the people (or rather the believers) beyond popular decision-making, resembles more closely an older tradition on the far right. That is the idea, articulated by Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), that the Enlightenment was a rupture in the divine fabric of the world, separating ‘man from the Divini-ty’. Who were the agents who brought about this rift? The enemies of the French Revolution suspected a conspiracy of diabolical origin: the agents of evil ranging from Illuminat-ed Freemasonry to the Jews. The enemies of the Moslem Brotherhood strongly resemble those of the classic French extreme-right rather than the biological pollutants of Der Stürmer. For the Pan-Islamists and supporters of a restored Caliphate, the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse were “Jew-ry”, the “crusade”, “communism” and “secularism”’ (Gilles Kepel, The Roots of Radical Islam, 2005). The foes of the Maurrasians were and (in the tendencies that still support them in Le Pen’s Front National and the French extreme right), the Jews, the Protestants, Communists and Freema-sons (a pillar of Gallic secularism).

But such analogies cannot be extended far, and Berman stretches the comparison to breaking point. Some Europe-an fascists anchor themselves in the soil and its dead, and exalt cultural identity, even tolerating the ‘other’ (non-


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European) as long as it is kept far away; others keep some-thing of Alfred Rosenberg’s cult of will and racial soul, and desire planetary hegemony. The Islamists, while not foreign to Arab racial and cultural chauvinism, even racism, bind themselves to an invisible world of divine truth, set out in the book of the world, whose meaning is apparent only through Qu’ranic verses — in principle accessible to all. Above all, the Book is not the Führer or Duce. Religious council limited even Khomeini the Guide.

These are only some indications of the limits of Ber-man’s use of the catch-all category of totalitarianism. It becomes less than helpful when applied to the present sub-ject. In Dissent Andrew F March makes a convincing case for demarcating Ramadan from this tradition. He has a tendency to ‘ignore all the places where Ramadan does de-nounce his grandfather’s and Qaradawi’s legacy (for surely these statements are just the set-up for a subtle backtrack-ing or retraction, right?), but he also completely misses how Ramadan has changed from his earliest positions’. It is, in this context, ludicrous and offensive to place Ramadan within the foulest traditions of the far-right: he is clearly a democrat. No admirer of the Shoah would even contem-plate the kind of dialogue that the Oxford Professor has initiated, or show the glow of love and compassion that he has put on naked public display.

Berman’s claims are stronger when he tries to situate Ramadan fully in political and class terms (that is, as some-thing more than a quest for ‘influence’). While ‘he would like his Salafi counter-culture to become a main centre, instead of a faraway outpost, of the larger Muslim world’, his horizon does not end there (p 150). If the Oxford Profes-sor has any strategy it is surely one of a slow ‘war of posi-tion’ for influence, a fight he is prepared to wage in order to conquer the heart of the British Establishment. The French Nouvelle Droite has tried to develop a Gramscianism of the Right, but its vehicle has been political parties. The all-embracing medium of the UK state, dominant class bloc, and its ideological apparatus is to be the instrument for Ramadan’s ‘post-integration’ plans to establish Western Islam in its rightful place. Or, to put in less Marxian lan-guage, the Swiss-educated ‘reformist Salafist’ wants Islam to get its slice of the British liberal pluralist cake.

Given the Liberal–Conservative Coalition’s enthusiasm for ‘faith communities’ one can easily imagine the Islamic Scholar eyeing up the potential of the ‘Big Society’. As the market state devolves power to local oligarchies and private companies, organised religion is a player. Ramadan was vaguely ‘anti-capitalist’ when the term was fashionable, and promoted social solidarity in place of unrestrained econom-ic liberalism. Organic pictures of social being stand well in this prospect. So does a belief in its apparent opposite, di-versity. Ramadan is adept at merging this type of contradic-tory imagery. As he says in his most recent book: ‘To love is to reconcile the sedentary presence with nomadic migra-tion, the roots of the tree with the strength of the winds.’ The European Muslim can, in other words, find herself ‘at home’ on the Continent. ‘The ocean mirror that reflects our image now reflects that of a humanity that is in quest of reason, God, truth, happiness or love… always in search of meaning, serenity and peace.’ (The Quest for Meaning, 2010 — more on this below) A common civilisation of religious faith is, therefore, possible. These sentences, apart from being gobbledegook, are indicative of a shift. If violence

lurked behind Ramadan’s public agenda, it has drained away into the seas.

Ramadan as Philosopher

Berman is at his strongest in attacking Ramadan’s philo-sophical pretensions. Since we have already begun some work in this area, describing his ‘pitiful dogmatism’, it is a pleasure to see someone with the resolve to wade through the turgid texts that he cites. Ramadan, The Flight notices, makes much of a certain Abu Hamid Ghazali (CE 1058-1111). He believed in the World Terrestrial and the Realm Terres-trial. William James, whom Berman cites, discusses him in a few pages of a chapter on Mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Ghazali talked of ‘in the pro-phetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hid-den things and objects which the intellect fails to reach’. James commented that for him: ‘Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but no one else.’ Less generously Berman compares him to the early Renaissance ‘doctrine about symbols and a world of spirit’. Far from forming the basis of modern science or philosophy, as Ramadan repeatedly asserts, these ideas were abandoned at the beginning of the modern age. Ghazali was someone who helped block this development in Muslim lands. He was ‘one of the many religious thinkers over the centuries who have inflicted a genuine damage to science — in al-Ghazali’s case, by arguing that laws of nature do not exist’ (p 225).

Ramadan’s philosophy, such as it is, is therefore funda-mentally awry. It is poetic rather than analytical. This is quite explicitly set out in the Messenger (2007). He states that this:

… revealed Book, the written text, is made up of signs (ayat), just as the universe, like a text spread before our eyes, is teeming with signs. When the heart’s intelligence, and not only analytical intelli-gence, reads the Qur’an and the world, then the two texts address and echo each other, and each of them speaks of the other and of the One. The signs re-mind us of what it means to be born, to live, to think, to feel, and to die.

The Flight compares such ‘reasoning’ to Ralph-Waldo Em-erson’s efforts to reconcile science with these ancient ideas or the Over-Soul, perhaps ‘as the great soul has enshrined itself… that is now the flower and head of all living nature’ (Spiritual Laws, 1841). However it is the Qur’an that is the true fountain of knowledge. One might there be reminded of Emanuel Swedenborg’s declamation that ‘in every of particular of the Word there is an internal sense, which treats of spiritual and celestial things and not of such natu-ral and world things as appear in the sense of the letter’ (Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen, 1758) For Ramadan ultimately then the Qur’an is simply true, and this assertion, even by a ‘reformist’, brooks no contradiction.

Or perhaps it can be submerged. The Flight was written before Ramadan’s most ambitious ‘philosophical’ excursion to date, The Quest for Meaning (2010). This he describes as:

… a strange mixture of analytic thought, Cartesian-ism, strict rationalism and flights of mysticism, some of them quite ethereal. It really has a strange


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journey through the lands of eastern philosophies, religions, the sciences, psychology and the arts, fly-ing from one to another, weaving links, and opening up horizons by starting out from the one and the multiple, as though the presence of the ocean were enough to reconcile the windows rather than sepa-rate them. (p 209)

This is too modest, there are the countries of Marx, Aristo-tle, Comte, Foucault, Rousseau and many, many others that he has explored and wishes to describe to us. But in truth, there are so many ideas in this ‘philosophy of pluralism’ that we drown in the water. Or rather, Ramadan has cooked up an olla podrida. That is ‘fusion cuisine’, a dish with multiple ingredients from different traditions. One not too imaginary British version might consist of a beef, fried chillies in extra-virgin olive oil, mushrooms, lemon grass, garlic, onions, aubergines, courgettes, peppers, kaki fruit, bay leaves, oregano, rosemary, stock, sweet corn, tomatoes, vinegar, saffron, salami and mustard greens. Cheese is sprinkled on it. It is served with fresh pasta and garlic bread. It savours of mush. It tastes of mush. It is mush. The Quest for Meaning is such an intellectual olla podrida: it has so many ingredients there is no flavour left. In this respect at least Ramadan has truly immersed himself.

Islam, Politics and Secularism

Ramadan may venerate Islamists with dubious political and social ideas. But the main problem he presents is his re-fusal, as Berman says, to back a genuinely Westernised Is-lam based on the recognition of the secular distinction be-tween private faith and public democracy. Let us always bear in mind that his faith is primarily in ‘the oneness of God, the status of the Qur’an, prayer and life after death’ (What I Believe, 2009). In this he may edge closer to John Locke’s concept of tolerance, supporting liberty of con-science and opposition to giving the Magistrate the power to rule the intimacies of men’s souls. But he is definitely not at one with Voltaire’s Traité sur la Tolérance (1763), which declared war on intolerance. The French lumière was con-cerned to demolish the institutions of intolerance, the reli-gious corporations that had ‘couvert la terre de carnage’. Ramadan would not wish faith, be it in Mosques, Churches, Temples or Synagogues, to lose its temporal strength.

The desire to hold to the divine ‘status’ of the Qur’an is not without consequences. It is often said that the heart of Islam is the Sharia — the word of God that rules every as-pect of people’s lives. Ramadan’s inability to adopt secular values has come to the fore, as The Flight notes, in his tor-tuous calls for a ‘moratorium’ on the most severe Sharia punishments, the ‘huddud’ — the death penalty for aposta-sy, the stoning of adulterers, the amputation of the limbs of thieves, and other ‘laws’. That is before we go further into different Islamic ‘legal schools’ and their versions of these and the vengeance of the Muslim talion. The fact that women and non-Muslims count for less than Muslim men in these religious ‘courts’ casts doubt on the credentials of anyone who considers them just. There is no equality be-fore the law in Islamic ‘jurisprudence’.

This came to a head on French television in 2003. The future French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, confronted the future Oxford Don. Ramadan refused to condemn these punishments, specifically on stoning miscreant women,

arguing that a ‘consensus’ amongst scholars and the Mus-lim community had to be reached on the subject before anything more than a temporary halt could be called for. Berman comments that he appeared to seek credibility with his own faith community (Berman uses the metonymic symbol ‘Brick Lane’ for this rather vaster and more complex grouping). Later, however, we learn that Ramadan has mooted the idea of a broad, global debate, drawing in secu-lar scholars. But we remain transfixed by what The Flight calls the eruption of ‘a moment of barbarianism’. Ramadan simply would not denounce stoning outright. We could then see ‘the whole panorama of Muslim women’s oppres-sion suddenly deployed across the television screens of France…’.

Ramadan was, by contrast, quick to react to French laws that prevented religious dress codes entering into schools. I recall a certain editor of Islamophobia Watch asking my help in translating one of his texts predicting a ‘hot rentrée’ (school return after the summer holidays) when the rules were due to be enforced. Suddenly a ‘woman’s right to choose’ — the veil — became of great importance. This ignored, as Berman rightly points out, that the demand for public spaces free of religious pressure had great support amongst Muslim women. He was no doubt surprised that the temperature never rose, and indeed dropped to zero when Islamists abroad made the progressive new regula-tions a target for terrorist acts.

Feminism is one of Ramadan’s weakest flanks. Women’s rights collide with Islam. Though no doubt some interpret the Qur’an to suit a minimal feminist agenda, it is hard to see polygamy and a host of other customs, laws and sanc-tions disappearing in some kind of voluntary moratorium: they are rooted in social relations, not just texts. Yet, as Berman is never reluctant to point out, the ‘multiculturalist’ agenda and the liberal desire to respect Ramadan’s ‘com-munity’ make them hard to reform.

There are women from a Muslim background who re-fuse to engage in the kind of ‘debate’ offered by the Oxford Professor of Islamic Studies. They tend to be ‘Enlighten-ment fundamentalists’, like the French group, Ni Putes ni Soumises (including those who have since split away to form a more politically independent organisation). In Hol-land the most famous example has been Hirsi Ali. She has attacked some of the multiculturalists dearly-held beliefs:

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colourful and proud people interacting peacefully while maintain-ing delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, igno-rance, and abuse.

This was locked into a whole range of cultures that depend on Islamic sources, which give a ‘sense of honour and male entitlement’. Furthermore:

American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. Rather than standing up for Western freedom against the totalitarian Islamic belief system, many liberal pre-fer to shuffle their feet and look down at their shoes when faced with questions about cultural differ-ences. (Nomad, 2010)


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It is not surprising that such statements (written after The Flight’s publication but representative of long-standing opinions) should rub Ramadan’s admirers up the wrong way. For Ian Buruma, she reminds him of Thatcher:

… the same impatience with those from a similar background who lack the wherewithal to ‘make it’ and the same fascination with America… Aayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe. (Murder in Amsterdam, 2007)

It is not, as the joint author of Occidentalism (with Avishai Margalit, 2005) that Ali was wrong to criticise Islamists who see political reality in theological terms. Or that she could be repelled by an ideology that separates ‘the culture of Islam, in the service of God, and the culture of jahulyya in the service of bodily needs that degrade human beings to the level of beasts’. One might envisage Buruma accepting that his own tendresse for the Islamic philosopher could be at least politely criticised. But there are ways of disagreeing and ways of offending. This ‘daughter of the Somali élite’ showed community bad manners. At one meeting she waved her hand, and it was ‘this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of noisome inferior, that upset her critics more than anything’.

Liberals like Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash show-ered ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’ of Hirsi Ali’s stripe with well-mannered insults, even suggesting that she would not have been heard had she been ‘short, squat and squint-ing’. Berman has some fun with their contortions, and shows even their principal critics, the otherwise obnoxious Pascal Brucker, in a good light. There is a fight against ‘fun-damentalism’, or in French, integrisme (a better word, im-plying adherence to a ‘whole’ doctrine), and allies from her quarter are needed. It is obvious to anyone but the peddlers of cultural relativism that if human rights are universal (however we understand this in historical and social terms), then Hirsi Ali is justified in applying them to Islam. To do otherwise is, as Bruckner says, to treat Muslims as children who should be protected from rules that apply to other people. Or, to believe in the kind of nonsense that regards Islamic dress codes as vehicles of ‘modesty and pride’ through which ‘feminine agency’ works (Judith Butler, Pre-carious Life, 2006). If there are reasons to respect Muslims because many in Europe are amongst the least well-off, this does not apply to Islam, still less to Islamism: Muslims may be poor, but the Mosques are rich.

Hirsi Ali, like another critic of Islam, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nazreen, should be defended to the hilt. The Rushdie affair and the Danish cartoons scandal illustrated that free speech cannot be negotiated away. Berman raises the bar of Hirsi, and rightly so, by stating that ‘a more clas-sic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist’ (p 257). This, naturally, invites a bout of ‘what-boutery’, as other dissidents suffer perhaps worse fates, but more modestly one can say she has been driven from pillar to post, and that many of her charges against the sexist character of many forms of Islam are hard to gainsay. But the idea that one could be a supporter of the Somalian fem-inist’s rights and a supporter of the fight against Western political and economic domination of the planet does not seem to have figured in their debates.

Nor does the existence of a strong strain of secularism

on the European left. No doubt to please his own sense of permanent outrage about ‘totalitarianism’, we are treated to homilies about an alliance between the far-left and Islam-ism. He is disappointed that his own anti-totalitarian liberal left ran out of steam in France in the 1990s. In place of the 1980s SOS Racisme, backed by figures he finds sympathetic, such as Marek Halter, the Estate-based Islamists, described in Boulem Sansel’s novel The German Mujadid (and inci-dentally, the Trotskyist detective writer, Tierry Jonquet, and by Yasmina Khadra — the list is long), took over. The same process occurred elsewhere, notably in Britain, where Islamism became a feature of many inner-city Muslim en-claves:

The Trotskyists eyed the newly-visible street-corner Islamists, and by squinting, they found a sympathet-ic new way of viewing the entire development. This was sociological, instead of ideological. A focus on social class instead of a focus on ideas. (p 176)

Despite then the fact that Islamism was clearly on the far-right (as he notes, Tony Cliff regarded the Muslim Brother-hood in this light), the raw material appealed to the activ-ists: ‘And, in a spirit of Marxist solidarity, the Trotskyists reached out.’ (p 176)

For Berman after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and in the lead-up the invasion of Iraq a real possibility for mass mobilisations, around an Islam–left axis, developed. If the Trotskyists were small in number they were able to mobilise people: ‘the tiny movement knew how to shape events’ (p 177). Thus was born a ‘new and peculiar alliance’ (p 178). In London the Stop the War Campaign, an alliance of the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain, brought millions onto the street: ‘Nothing like a Trotsko-Islamist alliance could possibly have mobilised millions of Britons in the past.’ (p 179) Another peculiar alliance emerged between liberal hawks like Berman and American neo-conservatives shaped rather more significant events, by invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, but this seems unworthy of mention in The Flight.

The result of this ‘Trotsko-Islamist’ alliance, Berman implies, is indulgence towards the Islamists’ worst sides, notably their anti-Semitism. He cites an attack on yarmul-ke-wearing Jews on a Paris anti-war march, but neglects to mention that Ligue Communist Révolutionnaire (LCR) stewards then mobilised its ‘service d’ordre’ to smash any-one expressing anti-Jewish views on all subsequent demon-strations. Regarding Britain, one should add that the StWC was overwhelmingly organised by the ‘broad left’, and that the SWP/MAB coalition only stuck because the protest was held around the lowest common denominator — opposi-tion to the war. It was certainly was not an endorsement of Islamism. I speak as someone who was heavily involved in a local group that took 12 coach-loads of people to the big 2003 London demonstration, and recall that there was op-position from many sections of the left to a real alliance with Islamism. When one happened, as it did with the Re-spect Party, the affair went down in the farce of George Galloway’s appearance on Big Brother, and the sordid squabbling of local politics in Brick Lane.

An ‘alliance’ with Islamism and the left never occurred in France. Much of the far left supported the veil ban, and even those who did not regarded and still regard it as sign and reality of oppression (not to mention that the Burqa


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has provoked near unanimous hostility). Why? The French left is secular, much of it militantly so. The 1930s non-Communist extreme left, in the form of Pivertism, made this their particular badge of honour. At present the succes-sor party of the LCR, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA), has effectively pushed out its sole public representa-tive who wore the veil and is sometimes accused of ‘Islam-ophobia’. The Parti de Gauche is much more hard-line and adopts a Voltarian stand on all religion. Across the Conti-nent secularist leftists, hostile to Islamism, and largely in-different to Ramadan, is influential, though pockets of syc-ophantic sympathy for his views exist, notably in the circle around former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, whose in-dulgence in this area is the subject of violent criticism from other sections on the left. There is a real debate, about the place of religion in politics, and about secular institutions in the context of wider issues of social justice. But no echo is found in The Flight. On the Simpsons there is a British character who produces films about stupid Yanks titled American Bonehead. One cannot but feel that in his treat-ment of the European left Berman, who has a thin patina of knowledge about us, offers a rival production, Leftist Lame-brains.

Flawed but Invigorating

The Flight is more than worth reading: it is essential. It is indeed a serious contribution to public debate. Yet it is hard to forget Berman’s warmongering. Or, as Elbert Ven-tura put it, ‘the theme of an embattled liberal civilisation facing a totalitarian or fascist onslaught’ is wide of the

mark. To establish this proposition one would have ex-pected at least some discussion of ‘actually existing Islam-ism’ in Iran, a theocracy and bloodied autocracy with dem-ocratic elements. There is none. Everything is centred on the Middle East. Opposition to Israel and Zionism, no doubt one of Berman’s principal concerns, is far from being yoked to Islamism and anti-Semitism, though that would take another essay to discuss. Our problem, at least in Eu-rope, is that religion is encroaching on the public space: a non-democratic, though not ‘anti’-democratic, current. The inspiration behind faith is an obstacle to negotiated poli-tics: it rests on an appeal to ‘things unseen’ which cannot be negotiated with rationality. For socialists it splits people on imaginary grounds, without roots in real class interests. That is a concern Berman does not speak to. His inability to grasp the nature of a central strand in European leftist thought — secularism — grates. When the religiously minded shout their fear of intellectual New Atheists, such as Michael Onfray or Richard Dawkins, it is odd to assert that the intelligentsia is still weeping tears of white self-loathing in their anxiety to appease Islamists. There is natu-rally another approach. The British establishment has qui-etly embraced Ramadan, the target of so much ire, and he has lost his distinctive message in the process. It is in this role that he merits criticism, as severe as one can make it, of his political-religious beliefs. It would, by contrast, on the evidence we have examined, be more than an error to attribute the crimes of Nazism to the Oxford Professor; it would be a very serious fault.

Mike Jones

Kosovo: The Successful Intervention?

LTHOUGH only a few die-hards these days consider the Western invasion and occupation of Iraq to be any-

thing but a disaster, those endorsing the NATO war against Libya invariably hark back to the Western intervention in Kosovo as an example of where such military action led to a successful outcome. The reality is, as we have pointed out in this magazine, considerably different, and it now seems that even the big powers are reconsidering the consequenc-es of their supposedly ‘successful’ intervention.

The general election in Kosovo last December gave Hashim Thaçi’s Democratic Party only 33 per cent of the vote. The Democratic League came second, and the Move-ment for Self-Determination was third. The two latter par-ties rejected a coalition with the Democratic Party, whose drop in support reflected disillusion with the political and economic stagnation, but also the unchecked crime in Ko-sovo. Both the opposition and international observers ac-cused the Democratic Party of swindle, as two districts reg-istered a 95 per cent turn-out, twice the normal one. It

seems that the ‘international community’ is finally aban-doning support for Thaçi & Co.

Serbs in Mitrovica and thereabouts boycotted the elec-tion, but elsewhere in Kosovo they participated. The former look to a return to Serbian jurisdiction and the idea of ex-changing territory has been aired; the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia is inhabited mainly by Albanians, whereas northern Kosovo is predominantly Serbian in population. But this, of course, would strengthen moves for the Repub-lika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina to secede and adhere to Serbia; similarly, Albanian areas of Macedonia would want the same. As we said at the time, Bosnia-Herzegovina is not a nation state as the preconditions for such a thing are ab-sent, and neither is Kosovo. Western meddling in ex-Yugoslavia, based on ulterior motives, hasn’t resolved any-thing in the long term.

The Movement for Self-Determination, led by ex-student activist Albin Kurti, rejects territorial exchange and wants fusion with Albania. Kurti’s campaign had active

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support from William Walker, the US ‘diplomat’ — intelli-gence agent — who ‘discovered’ — fabricated — the ‘Račak massacre’, which led to NATO’s war on the rump Yugosla-via. In Kosovo he’s a hero. In a public meeting he de-nounced Thaçi’s government for corruption, repression, etc, as well as the ‘international community’ for ignoring it.

On 16 December in Paris, Dick Marty, who came to prominence over his investigation into ‘extraordinary ren-dition’ by the CIA, whereby terror suspects were kidnapped and flown to third countries for torture, European govern-ment complicity, and the existence of secret prisons in EU countries, presented his report into the criminal activities of Hashim Thaçi and his cronies in the KLA’s Drenica group (the Drenica Valley, a KLA stronghold, was the scene of fighting between the KLA and Yugoslav units before the war). Two years of investigations conclude that: ‘Thaçi con-trols a network of drug-smugglers, assassins, torturers and traders in stolen human organs.’

Dick Marty, a liberal Swiss lawyer, wrote that ‘first-hand sources’ had reliably implicated three KLA leaders and Thaçi, plus other members of his inner-circle, ‘in ordering — and in some cases overseeing — murder, detentions, beatings and interrogations in various parts of Kosovo, and… on Albanian territory, between 1998 and 2000’. The year of 1998, of course, was before NATO’s war against the rump Yugoslavia.

A farm near Tirana airport, equipped for the purpose, was used for organ extraction. Prisoners were shot in the head and the organ removed, then either inserted directly into the buyer or flown abroad. A current court case in Priština against the Medicus clinic is suspected to be linked to the KLA group’s activities. Poor people from Russia, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Turkey were tricked into going

to Pristina, where their kidneys were stolen. Each organ was sold for around £80 000 pounds.

Carla del Ponte, the ex-prosecutor at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, wrote in her memoirs, published in 2008, that she had evidence that around 300 Serbs had had their organs stolen; she was told to keep quiet. Ten years after the war ended, around 2000 people are still missing and the investigations point to KLA involvement in some of these cases. Opponents of the KLA, or suspected spies or collabo-rators, whether Albanian, Serb or Roma, were held in secret prisons around Albania and eventually killed.

The report made clear that for more than a decade, an-ti-drug-smuggling authorities in at least five countries have named Thaçi & Co as having exercised violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics. Marty pointed out that Thaçi and his group could not have done as they ap-parently did, if they had not had the uncritical support from the West. Thaçi’s allies turned a blind eye to his activ-ities, as he was ‘their son-of-a-bitch’.

Prior to NATO’s war, when the vicious conflict in Koso-vo was hotting-up, we pointed out the nature of the KLA as a mafia-type outfit involved in various criminal activities. We were denounced by sectors of Trotskyism and other left-wingers, who shared naive illusions in this mafia outfit with its roots in hard-line Stalinism. Tam Dalyell MP and a few journalists expressed similar warnings, but were shout-ed down by the assorted apologists for imperialism. Even the pro-intervention Guardian gave prominence to the charges in Marty’s report, although little has appeared in the paper on this subject since. Apologies from our critics would be welcome considering the abuse to which we were subjected.

Paul Flewers

Porterhouse Bloomsbury? The New College of the Humanities

HERE has been much disgruntlement across the higher education sector and on the left about the proposal to

set up the New College of the Humanities in London. Writ-ing in the Guardian, Terry Eagleton considered the NCH to be a ‘disgustingly élitist outfit’ with its ‘bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and load-ed’: ‘It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic.’

Adopting a less splenetic but equally alarmed tone, a group of Birkbeck academics claimed that the NCH is ‘at the vanguard’ of the government’s ‘assault on public educa-tion’:

The forthcoming higher education white paper will likely further seek to marketise the sector, launching

a race to the bottom with private outfits first leech-ing off then asset-stripping our publicly-funded uni-versities to offer knockdown education at a profit. Going down that road will deliver a handful of pres-tigious research universities, which may choose eventually to become private institutions, and a host of cut-price private providers who care little about educational standards. Far from serving to improve quality or defend the humanities, this opportunistic venture will hasten the decline of the reputation for excellence that British universities, as public institu-tions, have fought so hard to establish.

The NCH is an unusual venture. Opening in 2012 — the year when undergraduate tuition fees across the higher education sector will increase precipitately, mostly to £9000

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per annum — and suitably located in Bloomsbury, the tra-ditional heart of London’s intellectual life, it is offering University of London humanities degrees for £18 000 per annum. It is fronted by a team of 14 academics who, if not exactly household names, are reasonably well known to the general public and certainly to those with an interest in history or philosophy. After all, we’ve watched them on the telly and seen their books in Waterstone’s.

And so we have Professors AC Grayling, Richard Daw-kins, Niall Ferguson and a gaggle of other luminaries of the world of humanities. These — to quote from the NCH web-site — ‘distinguished academics of international reputation’ make up the professoriate, and ‘have given their expertise, experience and advice to the founding of NCH’. But what are these big names for? Does the mere fact of an academic having a programme on the BBC or Channel 4 or writing a book that breaks into the popular market somehow make him more qualified to front a new venture in higher educa-tion than a more obscure professor who eschews the broad brush of popular history for the intricacies of more special-ised areas of study? The Birkbeck academics state that ‘pre-cisely how much teaching they will do remains an open question’. The website promises that ‘they will visit the College to lecture and meet students, and to advise the full-time aca-demic staff on the delivery of the curriculum’. As for those actually doing the teaching, so far on the website we have the grand total of three somewhat less illustrious names.

Apart from offering University of London degrees and ‘the Diploma of New College’ — whatever that is — what do students get for their £18 000 annual fee? The NCH web-site promises ‘a staff-student ratio better than 1:10’, ‘person-al attention and one-to-one tutorials’, ‘richer course con-tent and increased student-staff interaction’, and ‘academic depth combined with practical career skills’. However, hav-ing completed an undergraduate degree course in a con-stituent college of the University of London, I can happily state that I and my fellow students considered that the staff-student ratios, ‘personal attention’, ‘course content’, ‘student-staff interaction’ and ‘academic depth’ were per-fectly adequate.

So what is the purpose of the NCH? Although a Univer-sity of London degree is highly considered around the world, it is not that difficult with the requisite A-level scores to obtain a place on a humanities course in one or another of the university’s colleges, and there are usually a fair number of unfilled places on such courses in the clear-ing advertisements that appear in the press during the summer. This shortfall in applicants will almost certainly in-crease in 2012 when tuition fees increase to £9000 per annum. Doing a humanities degree in any of the University of Lon-don’s colleges is by no means an easy ride, yet considerable numbers of students manage to obtain upper-second-class degrees every year, and even first-class degrees are not that rare. There is only one conclusion that can be drawn.

Nearly four decades ago, the novelist Tom Sharp wrote Porterhouse Blue, a very amusing novel about a fictional Cambridge college that, amongst its other peculiarities, had an interesting admissions policy. In exchange for a confi-dential ‘endowment subscription’, lads were admitted who would otherwise not get into a prestigious higher education establishment. And then the wily head porter would, in exchange for a suitable sum, arrange for bright but im-pecunious research students in other colleges to write their essays and even sit their examinations. By such means the less gifted sons of the élite would be able to brandish the necessary impressive degree certificate in order to ease their entry into the world of national poli-tics, high finance and other such places of wealth and influ-ence.

Now I’m not suggesting for one second that those at-tending the NCH would feel the need to slip a few quid to needy research students in neighbouring University of London colleges in exchange for a suitably intelligent essay or would dream of indulging in a spot of personation at examination time. I certainly do not believe that NCH aca-demics would ever condone such fraudulent practices. But there are times when fiction can be uncomfortably close to fact. Why, when good A-level results can usually ensure access to a University of London humanities course, should anyone wish to pay £18 000 per year when one can pay one-half of that for exactly the same qualification at one of the university’s perfectly adequate colleges? One is forced to conclude that this new college will effectively be a forcing house for the none-too-bright offspring of well-to-do par-ents.

There are a lot of unpleasant things happening in the world of higher education, most notably the drastic reduc-tion of state funding of universities and the resulting cuts in jobs, courses and provisions and massive increases in tui-tion fees. The New College of the Humanities is an unwel-come newcomer on the scene, and nobody concerned about the future of higher education can look at it without feeling considerable disquiet. I can understand the fears and concerns of those who have protested. But altogether I feel that it is not the dire threat to higher education that so many have deemed it to be. My prediction is that all it will attract, apart from the few lucky enough to win a scholar-ship covering their tuition fees, will be well-heeled medioc-rities, those not only unable to obtain the requisite A-level grades to enter Oxford or Cambridge, but also unable to get a place at one of the University of London’s colleges. And it will remain to be seen whether the college, with all its aca-demic prowess and generous student facilities, will be able to transform such also-rans into students with sufficient intellectual abilities to complete successfully the vigorous process of a University of London humanities course. Its future as a successful college of higher education is by no means guaranteed.

REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY Latest Issue — The Left in Iran, 1941-1957

BCM 7646, London WC1N 3XX — www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk


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Mike Belbin

The Lone Crusader and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

ACK in July 2008, the BBC ran a brief thriller series called Bonekickers. Each week it featured a group of

archaeologists investigating a deadly mystery, usually in-volving a corpse over a thousand years old. It was duly slat-ed by reviewers for being tedious and ridiculous, over-the-top and (safely) distant from the real world of the News. The Spectator’s TV critic, however, slammed it for being outrageously ‘politically correct’ and typical of BBC liberals’ fantasies about the world. For example, in one episode a young man dressed himself up as a Crusader and beheaded an Asian youth-worker. Well, in Oslo in July 2011 the ridicu-lous came to life, with murderous effect. Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, either alone or with a few accomplices, exploded a fertiliser bomb at the offices of Norway’s Labour Prime Minister, while at the same time personally shooting dead 69 members of the Labour Youth movement on Utøya Island.

At his court hearing, Breivik was prohibited from mak-ing a political statement justifying the massacre (‘security’ was given as a reason), but his manifesto was available online and in a 12-minute video summary (see www.Kevin slaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+ Declaration+of+Independence.pdf on YouTube: Knights Templar 2083 by Anders Behring Breivik).

Commentators on TV and radio were quick, after estab-lishing that he wasn’t a Muslim, both to condemn the mas-sacre and to dismiss the captured perpetrator as a ‘lone nut’. In the week following, far-right politicians such as the Front National’s Marine La Pen and the Dutch Freedom Party’s Geert Wilders dissociated themselves from the act. As La Pen said, this was the work of a ‘lone lunatic who must be ruthlessly punished’, and Wilders called him ‘a violent and sick character’.

Is Breivik then to be put behind us as a lone obsessive, rabid Nazi or anti-Muslim? On the other hand, are we in danger of implying a huge rightist conspiracy with both political and military wings?

No, but before the Norwegian farmer becomes yester-day’s news we might find something in examining the his-tory out of which he came. After all, following the destruc-tion of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, no one insisted on dismissing those perpetuators as lone luna-tics. Instead, over the last 10 years, many links have been drawn between this event and Islam in general, Muslim fundamentalism in particular and even verses in the Koran. Distinctions of course were made. For example, fundamen-talist Saudi Arabia, a US ally, was soon cleared, and Blair assured us that he was not against all Muslims — just the oppositional ones, the ‘terrorists’. Various names were

coined to cover the enemy — Jihadists, Islamists, al Qaeda. But no one detached Islam or Muslims from these acts en-tirely, no one went for the ‘isolated lunatic’ tag. There was general agreement: 9/11 had something to do with politics and religion.

Breivik’s Declaration and video give you a clear idea of how he sees himself, a Christian Crusader in the line of such Defenders of the West, whom he lists, as Richard the Lionheart, El Cid and Vlad the Impaler.

Like his 22 July victims, however, his main targets aren’t individual Muslims or their organisations, but the ‘political-ly correct’ or what he dubs Cultural Marxists, whom he sees as clearing the way for ‘Islamisation’. This view is not so distant from the analysis found elsewhere, that Muslims, by trading on liberal goodwill and religious tolerance, will change Europe’s politics and culture. Books such as Reflec-tions on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West by Christopher Caldwell (2010) are acclaimed on Amazon as ‘part of a growing literature on the threat pre-sented to Christian or perhaps secular post-Christian Eu-rope by postwar immigration from Islamic countries’.

Now indeed there are debates to be had on what rights and tolerance involve in a secular world or the alliances some left groups form with traditional community élites, but Breivik for one is in no doubt that the enemies of the majority in Europe and the West are to found in European universities and left parties with their encouragement of Muslim immigrants and Arab regimes. In his Declaration he starts by picking out for attention the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research set up at Frankfurt Univer-sity in 1923. Now many Labour politicians have probably never read a line of theorists from the Institute like Adorno and Marcuse, while in academic circles probably more in-fluential have been the social theory and philosophy from Paris, like post-structuralism and deconstruction.

The purpose, however, of all ‘Cultural Marxists’, along with ‘Suicidal Humanists’ and ‘Capitalist Globalists’, is to ‘deconstruct European national identities’. This is done by policies of multiculturalism and political correctness, ‘the replacing of patriarchy with matriarchy’ and ‘laying penal-ties on native European men and… giving privileges to the “victim” groups they favour’ (Declaration, p 13). One of the-se groups is, of course, those migrating across the world for work, particularly Muslims.

So although CMs and their accomplices follow Gramsci, Trotsky and Betty Friedan, their aim being an ‘EUSSR’, they will in effect set up a ‘Eurabia’. You’d think people planning on ‘a society of radical egalitarianism’ would register that Islamist HQ is just waiting to take over. But Breivik is too

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clever for them — he can see through socialist and feminist pretensions to equal rights straight through to their sup-port for domination by one of the monotheisms.

Breivik is at pains though to deny he is a racist, he de-clares himself a Christian cultural conservative. National Socialism, he says, is just another ‘hate-ideology’ along with Communism and Multiculturalism. In the Declaration he gives a list of the ‘cultural conservatives’ he hopes to mobi-lise. They include ‘Anti-Jihad’ — those that are ‘anti-Islam-isation’ and ‘pro-Israel’ — but next on the list are ‘racial conservatives — anti-gay, anti-Jewish…’. So is he pro- or anti-Jewish — does it depend on how multiculturalist or pro-Israel they are?

Cultural conservatism has had a good run before Oslo. It certainly goes back at least to the French Revolution, from Burke’s traditionalism to Carlyle’s anti-liberalism, the notion of a World Jewish Conspiracy and TS Eliot’s antipa-thy for ‘free-thinking Jews’. Not all such tendencies have allied themselves with violence, but the same themes of cultural subversion and the defence of traditional status relationships resound. Breivik’s Declaration quotes many current conservatives. The presence of these quotations in the same document as his diary of bomb-preparation has given rise to furious disavowals, sometimes by politicians like Wilders (who otherwise calls for banning the Koran), and also by those seeking to exonerate writers in such as the Daily Mail (see Douglas Murray, www.spectator.co.uk). Their defence is that quotes in the Declaration from writers on immigrants and multiculturalism shouldn’t tar them with the same brush. For example, Breivik does quote John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) on his Facebook page, but this doesn’t mean Mill would have favoured shooting up ‘Cultural Marxist élites’. Let’s agree, there is no suggestion of a violent conspiracy of British columnists and continental politicians behind this crusader. But with Mill, Breivik is repeating a universal proviso: one man can make a difference; with others he’s quoting anal-yses, specific complaints, a rhetoric he shares.

In fact, the Declaration prints an entire article from the Mail by Melanie Phillips who describes ‘a politically moti-vated attempt by [Labour] ministers… to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a com-mon history, religion, law, language and traditions… For the government of which [Jack] Straw is such a long-standing member has secretly plotted to flood the country with im-migrants to change its very character and identity…’ (Decla-ration, pp 368-70) No one is accusing anyone at the Mail of being ‘in league’ with the Justiciar Knights (Breivik’s call sign), but we can ask them and others who have been quot-ed at length not only to disassociate themselves from the acts of the militant crusader but also from his arguments. (As far as I know, Osama bin Laden never quoted Lenin or Noam Chomsky, so a similar request for the left doesn’t apply.)

In fact, Marxists and other left thinkers have criticised multiculturalism too (especially in its self-interested official form, see Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, pp 56-63). There are also feminists who would object to being called any kind of Marxist, while some deconstructionists and post-colonialists find ‘equality’ a repressive concept erected by the imperious Enlightenment. Liberals (and historians) might well point out that Europeans have always trans-formed their institutions, from feudalism to capitalism, as well as ‘borrowed’ (if that is the word) from other peoples.

A purely European culture (in some kind of South Sea Is-land isolation) has never existed. Even our own off–shore Isles are threaded through with ‘continental’ classicism, Jewish wit and Black music, not to mention ‘foreign’ Ca-tholicism and Calvinism.

Breivik’s psychological condition is still under investiga-tion. Wherever the madness came from — family break-up, career disappointment — there waiting to obsess him were ideas he didn’t invent. Ideas formed from a sense of disin-heritance, a complaint that Europe, or a particular country, has been side-lined from the centre it once occupied at least up to the Second World War and that this shaky posi-tion has been further undermined by migrants and intellec-tuals who are changing European culture even to the point of suppressing it under another.

In his photos, and the brief film of him in custody, Breivik doesn’t seem a particularly angry or anguished man. He comes across as smoothly psychopathic, a young con-servative (the allusion is deliberate) who is having no truck with ‘liberal guilt’ or acceptance of even constitutional op-position. He is set on defending his Heritage from dilution and destruction. He defines himself against multicultural traitors and hostile outsiders. He has taken views and atti-tudes fairly well dispersed throughout Europe and the US to a pitch of committing his life to preparing and carrying out an act of terror (to terrify ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies’) that he obviously hopes will inspire other Knights (see the close of his YouTube video).

Breivik may be a psychopath but he is not a Martian. His politics are quite recognisably a product of the Move to the Right that has occurred since the 1960s. The fear and resentment created during ‘globalisation’ — capitalist pri-orities for migrant labour (and firms migrating to the cheapest labour) as well as disruption of social life in this short-termist profit economy — brought forth a grassroots conservatism that draws on xenophobia and nationalism, ideologies which have by no means been disregarded by nation-states themselves (‘British jobs for British workers’, proclaimed Gordon Brown).

Such irrationalities are dismissed as ‘backward’ and ‘yobbish’ (about the working class) as well as exploited by the ruling class. Sometimes the consequence is disastrous. It’s a process which may remind us of the tale of the Sorcer-er’s Apprentice. Check out the version with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia. First, Mickey animates by magic a broom to do his chore of carrying water, but ends up nearly drowned by buckets wielded by frenetic brooms.

Hitler’s Nazi Party became popular in a fractious Ger-many, gaining respectability in alliance with the conserva-tive National People’s Party (DNVP) that wished to use the Nazis to counter ‘Bolshevism’ and consolidate plebeian votes. Later when they were the much less popular party, these conservatives joined the Nazis in a coalition and sup-ported Hitler in his Enabling Act which gave him supreme power. Then the new brooms began sweeping. By 1941 Hit-ler had pushed his luck all the way to thinking Providence meant him to fight the USSR and the USA at the same time. The result was defeat and devastation.

No one has emerged yet in today’s Europe to unite street fighters like the EDL with constitutional xenophobes of the parties and media. Breivik attempts such an appeal in his propaganda, but his programme is now splashed with blood. In any case, the bourgeoisie are just not scared


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enough to risk another populist Götterdämmerung (and have not yet lost confidence in the official security forces): ‘deconstructionists’ and preachers like Abu Hamza aren’t as scary as the workers’ movements in the 1930s.

It is a mistake to characterise Breivik as a Nazi. Not only because of his disavowal (though confused) of classic anti-Semitism but his self-presentation as a defender, not an attacker. He is for walls and exclusion, not a civilising mis-sion and colonial adventure. His is a fortress conservatism. Neither, unlike Hitler, do Breivik and other cultural con-servatives make an appeal to the state taking over the community. Hitler never did alter the name of the party he took command of, the National Socialist German Workers Party: he recognised the appeal in his time of some form of state intervention.

Today’s conservatives dismiss statism, they are opposed to ‘big government’, even if they make exception for the military.

Since the 1930s, socialism has become a dirty word, whether presented as a cooperative economic idea, or simp-ly the expansion of state services. In the 1930s, even the

fascists wanted to be thought socialist. Today, even ‘wel-fare’, ‘the safety net’, has come under suspicion and attack.

The response then to cultural conservatism is not to call it Nazi or ask for more belief in ‘democracy’ that is, politicians, whose popularity knows no bounds of course, but to deal with the ‘failure’, or rather what one might call the compromising, of socialism and communism. Socialism has been compro-mised by nationalism, by reformism and by statism.

The socialist or revolutionary participatory project needs to tackle two far from easy tasks: to speak to the con-cerns of the disenfranchised everywhere, not sectioning up the international proletariat but finding common ground, and to do this partly by developing ways of debating an alternative future without over-prescriptiveness or side-stepping the problems of past ‘actually existing socialism’.

Breivik may now be isolated and dismissed, but some-thing like his programme, without an alternative, is still a deadly possibility, amongst the deprivations and discon-tent, from Athens to Tottenham, of twenty-first-century capitalism.

Reports from the USA

I: After Wisconsin, Which Road Forward: Class Independence or

Class Collaboration?

The following article is the text of a leaflet distributed by Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism at demon-strations held on 18 June 2011 against the proposals of the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to remove the right of state employees to collective bargaining and to impose new terms of employment, involving serious attacks on their pensions, health-care and working conditions.

* * *

Prepare for a General Strike, or Carry Water for

the Democrats Through 2012?

UR unions’ leaderships are not prepared to fight and win in the current economic crisis. They lack an analy-

sis of the nature of the crisis and are therefore incapable of mapping a road forward. They have buried themselves so far inside the corporate Democratic Party that they can’t see they are feeding the hand that bites us! They believe their own mythology that corporate capitalism can be run in a ‘moral’ manner, and that rational pressure exerted in the traditional manner can resolve the crisis in the interest of the working class. Not only are they mistaken at every step in the road, but their strategy and tactics are leading the working class to defeat and preventing the independent political action needed for the working class to defend and advance our own historic interests. After serving as a tool of class peace for so many decades, these leaders do not know how to respond to the objective fact that the bosses have declared class war on us, and this is a fight to the death!

What the Labour Tops Don’t Want Workers to Know

Labour leaders bemoan the decline of the ‘middle class’, but the real crime is that they went along with academic sociol-ogy and the TV culture which for decades has told workers they are not a ‘working class’, defined by their so-cial/economic relationship to the means of production, but rather a ‘middle class’ defined by income level and the cul-ture of consumerism. In the face of the economic decline of the American empire and the realignment of economic power toward a rising China, the ‘middle-class’ expectations of the American labour movement are no longer affordable in a ‘profit first’ driven economy. Our expectations have burst the limits of capitalism! This objective fact leaves the labour tops with nothing to offer workers today!

The international economic crisis has not been re-solved. Billions were thrown at banks and none of it trick-led down to jobs. Rather the big banks, speculators and corporate élite used it for personal bonuses, to continue speculative trading and to ‘rationalise’ their companies, increasing capital expenditure and cutting employees to assure returns for stockholders. As American workers’ wage packages (wages, cost of living allowances, pensions and healthcare) are slashed in an ‘employer’s market’ here at home, across the world in China workers’ wages are rising under the pressure of a working class which holds, on aver-age, 435 strikes a day. Businesses, The Economist tells us, are seeking to set a price point in their purchase of labour power (the commodity that workers sell) on the interna-tional market, before they can bring jobs back to the USA. But even the most optimistic economists predict that low-ering American wages would not bring back enough indus-trial manufacturing, or even service jobs, to put the 12 to 20 per cent unemployed back to work, much less to preserve the

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much-vaunted ‘middle-class’ lifestyle. The result is a marginal-ised youth, black and Latino population with no prospects for inclusion in the productive economy, and a prison industrial complex housing two million prisoners who are dispropor-tionately people of colour, and overwhelmingly come from the poorest layers of the working class.

As the crisis heads into what is termed a ‘double-dip’ recession, imperialism has its tentacles spread thin. Three wars, responsible for countless tens of thousands of civilian deaths, are being run by the Democrats, while covert ac-tions and drone strikes cross more borders than Wikileaks can keep up with. The workers of North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and China are attacking their governments and taking massive strike and protest actions. With the collapse in the bailouts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the potential downgrading of the USA’s bond rating by Moodys, it is clear the big bosses of the world economy see no way out except by imposing massive austerity measures, which they expect the trade union leaders, the Social Dem-ocrats, the Labour Parties and, in the USA, the Democratic Party to administer. And the class traitors at the head of our unions are following right along — witness SEIU Local 1000’s endorsement of Governor Brown’s regressive tax plans in California.

The bosses’ current strategy translates into attacks on all workers. The halving of UAW auto workers’ pay has set a new lower wage standard for American industrial and manufacturing work. The increase in class sizes and tuition for students, the cuts in public services, the gutting of pub-lic health and other essential governmental services and the scapegoating of the public worker have become standard measures across the nation. The attack on the last and larg-est bastion of the American labour movement, the public employee sector, is an all-out class war launched by big capitalists with the intention of imposing an historic defeat on the American working class.

In order for market forces (remember ‘the free hand of the market’?) to drive American workers’ compensation down to the price point where capital can rationally invest here again, the market demands gutting of defined benefit pension plans, driving down public-sector wages, cutting the social wage (government benefits), and shifting the burden of the crisis further onto the backs of the poor, workers and the oppressed. The market requires the de-struction of the unions and any organisations that organise the working class, the poor and the oppressed. Today’s un-ion leaderships are not prepared for this onslaught. In fact, these class collaborators act in diametric opposition to the interests of the working class; they are doing everything they can to stop us from organising independently of the bosses’ political parties, from launching solidarity actions, and from striking at all — let along building for the wide-spread, indefinite general strikes that will ultimately be needed to confront the bosses’ attacks.

A Failed Strategy for Labour

In the period of the expansion of the US Empire during and after the Second World War, the labour tops made peace with the American ruling class. Under the threat of rising working-class rank-and-file militancy in the 1930s (the rise of the CIO; general strikes in Minneapolis and San Francis-co), Congress passed the National Labour Relations Act — much lauded as a victory for workers, as it guarantees the

right to organise, but the actual purpose of which was to corral the working class into reliance on a state structure rather than our own self-activity. The NLRA was followed quickly by anti-labour laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act, which constrains labour by making it illegal to offer solidar-ity to other workers in the form of strike action. Today we see the result: the MUNI rank and file rejected a sell-out contract, only to have the ‘impartial’ arbitrator impose it over their objection. If workers in the Bay Area can be stripped of the right to collective bargaining without a fight, it exposes the role of the sell-out labour leaders, which is to constrain the working class during the imposi-tion of austerity. We need to shut down the entire Bay Area transportation grid to defend our MUNI drivers, but soli-darity strikes are against the Taft-Hartley law and the cra-ven leadership uses that law to keep the rank and file in line.

As long as the pre-eminent position of US imperialism brought home super-profits after the Second World War, infrastructure, education, technology and industry (particu-larly the military-industrial complex) created a high de-mand for labour. Rising wages increasingly came with la-bour peace, enabling the labour bureaucracy to transform itself into a self-perpetuating dues collection agency that acted in its own interests, abandoning class conflict for the ‘rational’ road of arbitration, lawsuits, legislation and buy-ing politicians.

This worked well for about 25 years, but the laws of cap-italist economics precluded the fantasies of the labour bu-reaucracy from enduring. As the economy changed and wages started to stagnate in the early 1970s, the illusion began to evaporate. There never was a ‘middle class’; we had been workers all along, and we could pay for the new consumerist culture of a ‘middle-class American dream’ only by sending the women of the household to work, by taking second jobs, and by incurring debt in the form of student loans, credit cards and second mortgages against our houses. Now all these stop-gaps are running out, and the explosion of the speculative stock market and inflated housing bubble economy is gutting the standard of living of the American working class. Wages have been flat or de-clining for decades; we work more hours than before; we have less vacation; we are less secure, and all the money has floated to the top 0.01 per cent while we are scrounging to hold on to a declining pay-check. The labour bureaucracy was not prepared for this! They still cling to their failed strategy of class collaboration with the Democrats, reliance on the courts, and lobbying legislators to ‘tax the rich’.

This strategy is not just a mistake. Rather, the union tops are doing their job, as defined for them by the bosses’ legal system. They will do everything possible to keep workers from taking strike action, and from mounting soli-darity actions with workers in other unions, counties, dis-tricts, states or nations. The labour bosses see the upsurge in rank-and-file militancy as a threat, which they can only contain by corralling it into electoral politics. Thus, the popular sentiment for a general strike in Wisconsin was diffused into a recall campaign, which prevents immediate militant action, and steers workers into placing faith and hope in the Democrats rather than in our own self-organised mass actions. Thus, the AFL-CIO forbids any mention of opposition to foreign wars as they prepare to rally the troops for the 2012 electoral cycle.


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How to Prepare for a General Strike

The current crop of union leaders is not going to prepare for a general strike. Instead, they spend most of our dues dollars selling concessionary contracts to the members, while giving the rest to lobbyists and lawyers, leaving our strike funds dry and our membership unorganised, frus-trated and demoralised. For the working class to avoid the historic defeat the Koch brothers have planned for us, we must first take back control of our unions! New militant rank-and-file leaders not afraid to confront Taft-Hartley through strike action must rise in the ranks to replace the functionaries and careerists who sap our dues while shed-ding crocodile tears about their inability to mobilise the membership and bring home the bacon.

Effective strike action and general strikes cannot be or-ganised unless we first either take over our unions, or else build new unions and other workers’ organisations with a new leadership. Our current union misleaders’ attitude is that they are only responsible to act in the interest of the dues-paying membership — not the future members, not the unorganised workers, not the unemployed, and certain-ly not the workers of the world, oppressed, exploited and brutalised as we are by Wall Street and the military indus-trial war machine. But our class can only survive and win if we take up the old Knights of Labour slogan: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All! Solidarity is our only power, and the ability to strike in the historic interest of the class is our strongest weapon. When the leaders of today’s unions spurn these tools of the international working class, they act as the agents of the ruling class in our organisations, and must be driven out and replaced. That means we need rank-and-file class-struggle caucuses to promote a new militant leadership, to fight for working-class independ-ence, and to build a fighting workers’/labour party that unites the entire working class and all our allies nationally and internationally to strike as one against the rule of the exploiters and build a movement for workers’ power and workers’ ownership of the means of production. Even though we have experienced a series of multiple defeats, and the prospects look gloomy, we cannot ignore the esca-lation in the class struggle across North Africa, Europe and Asia, nor the aspirations of the workers and peasants of South America. All of the developments overseas will have repercussions here in the US, ultimately taking the struggle against the bureaucracy from the realm of abstract theoris-ing to the concrete reality of shop-floor and union hall con-frontations, and battles to take our unions back!

The drive to build for a general strike must be pursued in conjunction with the democratisation of the unions and/or the formation of new workers’ organisations. As the current leaders continue to mislead the masses, workers’ frustration will rise, and the opportunity to form class-struggle rank-and-file caucuses that can challenge for pow-er will grow. To win, these caucuses must advance strategy, tactics and demands that unite the entire working class, and forge independence, and must prepare for and take united strike actions.

Demands such as no concessions, no take-aways, and ‘pay me my COLA’ are of immediate concern. Demands such as jobs for all and 30 hours’ work for 40 hours pay can unite labour with the unemployed and those on furloughs and reduced hours. Demands for universal healthcare, not

hand-outs to the insurance companies, will unite the or-ganised with the under-insured. Demands to nationalise the banks and major industries under workers’ control to provide immediate access to capital for job creation offer a solution to the crisis of market control. Demands to end imperialist interventions abroad can unite our organisa-tions with the workers across the planet who struggle against the same corporate criminals who are crushing us! Demands for labour to declare class independence and form a fighting workers’ party, organised shop by shop, office by office, block by block and school by school, can unite the entire working class in struggle. Ultimately, we need to organise to run our own candidates and to mobilise mass political actions up to and including an indefinite general strike, to resolve the crisis in favour of the working class majority — the 85 per cent of us who do the work! This demand exposes the traitorous role of subsuming the workers into the corporate political machine and shows the road out of the trap of electoralism.

These demands cannot be won by the current leaders, but can be when we take back and rebuild rank-and-file workers’ democracy. The fight to defend the working class from the bosses’ class war requires that labour must clean its own house! Drive out the functionaries, imperialists, corporatists and class collaborators! Then we can remake our unions into a militant organising force in the fight for the historic interest of the working class.

The sections of the Fourth International should al-ways strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to cre-ate in all possible instances independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions. If it be criminal to turn one’s back on mass organisations for the sake of fostering sectari-an factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate sub-ordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised con-servative (‘progressive’) bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution. (Le-on Trotsky, The Transitional Programme, 1938)

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II: Why We Must Say No To Shared Sacrifices and More

Concessions

The following article consists of excerpts from the keynote presentation by Jack Rasmus to the Emergency Labor Net-work Conference at Kent State University, Ohio on 24 June 2011. Rasmus is a professor of economics at two universities in Northern California, and is the author of the recent book, Epic Recession: Prelude To Global Depression (Pluto Press and Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) and Obama’s Econo-my: Recovery for the Few (Pluto Press and Palgrave-


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Macmillan, forthcoming). His blog is http://jackrasmus. com and his website is www.kyklosproductions.com. We thank Mike Calvert for bringing it to our attention. Further to the public expenditure cuts mentioned in this article, the budget cuts demanded by the agreement between Barack Obama’s administration and the Republicans signed into law in early August 2011 amount to $900 billion over the next 10 years, with a further $1.5 trillion to be announced by the end of this year.

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HE Obama ‘recovery’ of the past two years has been a recovery in which investors in stock and bond markets

have realised historic record returns, in which corporate profits have snapped back to new highs not seen in dec-ades, and in which banker and corporate CEOs have achieved record income gains once again.

The really big gainers, however, are the ‘mega-millionaires and billionaires’, who make up the wealthiest one per cent of households. Their share of all the income generated each year in the US has risen since 1980 from eight per cent to 25 per cent of all income each year. They own $39 trillion in total assets.

In contrast to this historic, lopsided recovery in favour of the wealthy and their corporations, the ‘bottom’ 90 per cent of American households — about 105 million earning less than $110 000 a year (with a median earnings of about $47 000) — are not only not participating in the recovery but are continuing to lose ground economically.

Nearly 10 million have lost their homes, with a predict-ed total of between 13 and 15 million out of 54 million mort-gages forecast to foreclose in the next few years. Seventeen million families are experiencing ‘negative equity’, with their homes worth less than they owe. More than 50 million are without any kind of health insurance coverage. More than 40 million have no full-time permanent job and earn on average 70 per cent of full-time pay as temporary and part-time workers. Forty-seven million Americans live be-low the official poverty levels.

Tens of millions are living off food stamps. Real weekly earnings for 100 million non-supervisory workers in the US are less in 2011 than in 1982. Most important, the total number of workers with jobs today is less than it was a dec-ade ago. Twenty-four million are still jobless, and for every four workers looking for a job there is only one job being offered.

Lies About ‘Shared Sacrifice’

Despite this outrageous lopsided recovery of the past two years, working families are being asked to ‘share the sacri-fices’ of still further wage, benefit and social programme cuts to pay the cost of recovery for the wealthy few and their corporations. Those who didn’t cause the crisis, who are the victims of it, are asked to foot the lion’s share of sacrifices.

All the talk by Obama administration officials about ‘shared sacrifices’ is mostly hype. There’s nothing remotely close to ‘sharing’ in either party’s proposals.

For example, in recent debates over cutting the deficit, President Barack Obama has indicated he will agree to cut $3 in spending for every $1 in tax increases, if Republicans will agree to raising the $1 in taxes. And Vice-President Joe Biden, who has been heading up the administration’s nego-

tiations with Republicans, has reportedly already agreed to a level of $1 trillion in spending cuts. But despite both Obama’s and Biden’s generous pre-offers, Republicans con-tinue to refuse to agree to anything resembling any kind of tax hike.

We are seeing a repeat of the administration’s failed ef-forts to get an agreement this past spring on cuts in last year’s 2011 budget. Democrats kept upping their offers to cut additional billions in spending, while Republicans con-ceded nothing, until the Democrats finally agreed to $38 billion of the $39 billion in spending cuts initially demand-ed by Republicans. Now it appears this same practice of making multiple offers, without counter-offers from the Republicans, is being repeated again by Obama and his administration in current bargaining over 2012 budget cuts.

All the talk about ‘shared sacrifice’ is a sham. They have already decided, both parties, to make us pay for the ‘recov-ery’ from which only they have so far been benefiting. The strategy is simple: we pay for the bailouts so that they can continue to enjoy their tax cuts.

All this talk about cutting deficits and debt is really a ‘straw man’. It’s really about cutting social security, Medi-care, Medicaid, education and just about every other social programme so that they don’t have to raise their taxes and so they can continue their foreign military adventures. For that to continue we need to give up not only our ‘money wages’ and benefits, but now also our ‘social, deferred wag-es’ as well. That’s what’s new today.

Obama’s and the Democrats’ strategy is to focus on cut-ting corporate and wealthy households’ tax loopholes. But for every $1 of revenues raised from loophole closing, they are already agreeing to $4 in cuts in social security, Medi-care, Medicaid, education and other programmes. Is that ‘shared sacrifice’?

And once the loopholes are closed with great fanfare, both Republicans and Democrats will agree to cut the cor-porate tax rate from its current 35 per cent to 20 per cent, this writer predicts. The trading of loopholes for top tax rate is a shell game that’s been played for the past 30 years. Close a loophole now to make it look like something’s being done, then lower the tax rate to make up for the loopholes.

Federal Debt Versus Social Security and Medicare

Today the Obama administration and Congress are show-ing their growing fixation on cutting the federal govern-ment deficit and federal debt — at the direct expense of the ‘social wage’, that is, deferred wages earned by workers in the form of social security, retirement, disability and Medi-care.

It is a fact that the US federal debt has risen from about $5 trillion in 2000 to now more than $14.3 trillion. That’s an accumulation of deficits over the past decade of about $9 trillion. But these deficits have nothing whatsoever to do with social security and Medicare. So why should working people have to pay for them? No one is really answering that question among the politicians and their corporate campaign sponsors.

An inspection of the causes of the Federal deficits and debt run-up over the past decade shows clearly that the causes of those deficits and debt escalation are Pentagon and war spending; Bush tax cuts benefiting overwhelmingly the wealthiest households, investors and corporations; the recent bailouts of banks and big corporations during the

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recent financial crisis and recessions; the refusal of the Bush administration and Congress to fund the Prescription drug plan since 2005 — a bill that has been primarily a windfall for the drug companies; the health-care cost esca-lation and its effect on federal subsidies to the States; and, finally, interest charges on the borrowing for all these six sources causing the deficit-debt run-up.

The annual increase in Pentagon and war spending over the past decade was 8.2 per cent — or $1.5 trillion. Other indirect war spending costs of the last decade will cost the US another $1 trillion, for homeland security at $40 billion a year, off-budget Pentagon projects, veterans affairs costs, energy department costs for military uses, etc.

The Bush tax cuts cost $3.4 trillion, 80 per cent of which accrued to the wealthy and corporations. That’s about $2.7 trillion, adding to that the extra $400 billion in extending the Bush cuts for two more years last December.

Collective stimulus programmes by Bush in 2008 and Obama in 2009-10 add another $1.8 trillion at minimum. Unfunded prescription drugs another $500 billion. Interest on all this about $300 billion. And another $800 billion from escalating health-care costs to the federal government and revenue from lost jobs and income tax payments not collected from the same.

That’s a total of approximately $9 trillion. War, dou-bling of Pentagon spending over the decade, health-care costs of various origins, Bush tax cuts for the rich and their corporations, recessions, bailouts and chronic poor job cre-ation — all add up to the $9 trillion. Nothing in that list is associated with excess benefit increases for social security and Medicare recipients.

Nonetheless, current deficit-debt debates in Congress focus almost exclusively on the latter. Even the Obama administration is reportedly obsessed with this focus, like all good Teapublicans.

It was recently reported, for example, that Vice-President Biden, who has been negotiating with House Republicans, has already agreed on $1 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts with them even though there’s been no

agreement on raising taxes on the rich and their corpora-tions. My prediction is that the Democrats will propose over-estimated and unverifiable revenue gains and closing tax loopholes to sell the even greater cuts in the social wage in the form of social security and Medicare.

Some Brief Concluding Comments

It should be clear that the crisis in the economy today, the failure to generate a sustained recovery that is fair for all, and the increasingly apparent and likely double-dip reces-sion on the horizon, is due to failed policies of the Obama administration and the Republican opposition. The solu-tions are there. The money is there. The country is not broke. It’s just that the wealthy and powerful few — who buy and own most politicians today — are hoarding the money and doing all they can to block a recovery for the rest of us. And most politicians are in their pay and their employ.

This has been — and is — the weakest and most lopsid-ed recovery of any recession in the last 75 years in the US. It appears to grow even weaker by the day. The fight is over ‘who pays’ for a recovery. The corporations, investors and wealthy households are committed to protecting their tax cuts and benefits and income no matter what the cost to the US, its economy, or to us. We’re all expendable to them. For them, the recovery has worked.

They are restored. So it’s back to business as usual. And the ‘bill’ for the crisis is to be paid by the rest of us. By the 100 million working-class and middle-class families. Our jobs, our wages and our benefits are on the chopping block.

Let them win this fight, and it will mean hardship and conflict unimaginable in our lifetimes. It will turn the clock back for workers and unions in this country to pre-1935. There is no alternative, no other choice, but to shout loud and clear, ‘No Phony Shared Sacrifices’ and ‘No More Con-cessions’.

But it will take more than words, slogans and even pro-posals and programme. It will take action by all and for all. Or, as we heard our brothers in the ILWU say: ‘An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.’ Let’s do something.

Reviews

Alexander Baron, From the City From the Plough, Black Spring Press, 2010

WHEN I fought in the British army in the Second World War in Sicily, I did not realise that one of my fellow sol-diers, in 243 Company of the Pioneer Corps, a corporal Joe Bernstein, with whom I campaigned in Sicily, Italy and then on the Normandy beaches, would turn out to become a well-known author under the name of Alexander Baron! Nor that 67 years later, at the age of 91, I was to read for the first time his book about the fighting in Normandy, From the City From the Plough, first published in 1948 and re-printed in 2010.

In his introduction to the 2010 edition, the military his-torian Sean Longden writes:

In the commonly espoused version of literary histo-ry, working-class literature exploded in the 1950s with a new breed of writers, the so-called ‘angry young men’. But these were not the first authentic voices of a literate British working class. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there had existed a stream of left-wing writers, many from the factories and mines of industrial Britain. Many were active in the Com-munist Party, the trade unions or the left wing of the Labour Party. Yet few of these writers ignited the literary world, mostly publishing one or two novels before returning to obscurity. They remain largely forgotten, in favour of their more successful literary descendants from the 1950s.

Yet there is one writer who bridges the gap be-


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tween the left-leaning writers of the interwar years and the new breed of ‘angry young men’ with their ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas: a novelist who was at his most powerful when writing about the war from the perspective of the ordinary soldier. An author whose work has been largely forgotten to all but a hard core of admirers, but who is increasingly being re-discovered by a new audience. That writer was Alex-ander Baron, and the book that launched his career was From the City From the Plough.

Alexander Baron was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein on 4 December 1917, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant fur-cutter working in the ‘rag trade’ in London’s East End. In 1934 he joined the Labour League of Youth (the Labour Party’s youth wing). By 1936 the LLOY in London had be-come polarised into bitterly opposed Stalinist and Trotsky-ist factions with hardly any ordinary ‘Labourites’ in be-tween. Any new members like myself were soon courted and recruited by the rival factions. The Trotskyists won me over, but Bernstein/Baron must have been recruited by Ted Willis’ ‘Advance’ faction which seceded and joined the Young Communist League. Although I don’t remember him at the time, we must have met either at con-ferences or in the street battles that the LLOY and the YCL conducted in the East End against Mosley’s fascist Black-shirts.

Until the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Communist Party’s policy had been an anti-war one based on the alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and their joint rape of Poland. The CP had been advocating peace negotiations with Hitler. Baron had origi-nally loyally accepted this CP line, but had been unhappy with it. As Longden explains in his introduction to the book:

… already the course of the war had begun to change his understanding of politics. In the summer of 1940, when he saw the soldiers returning from Dunkirk, Baron found himself with new thoughts, later writ-ing that he had been ‘obscurely stirred, with a touch of distress. I am sure that this was the other self in me awakened again… there was something going on around me that I did not want to be left out of any-more.’ When he was called up he felt what he de-scribed ‘as a drench of pleasure’. It was the start of what he called ‘a struggle for my soul’ between the Communist Party and his membership of an army that was actually fighting fascism.

The Soviet Union’s entry into the war on the same side as the Allies must have been a relief to him — although by then his faith in the CP and Stalinism generally had been severely weakened. When we found ourselves together in 243 Coy RPC he never expressed his reservations to me and I assumed he was still a loyal Stalinist. I regret that I did not approach him more forcefully as I am sure we could have arrived at some sort of accommodation and worked togeth-er. He was aware of my Trotskyist views and attempts to argue for them among our fellow soldiers.

Although From the City From the Plough is written as a novel, it is also a very true and accurate picture of the fighting in Normandy seen from the point of view of the ordinary soldier. The events and characters in the novel are

based on his own experiences and those of his fellow sol-diers. Many Pioneers were seconded from their own Pio-neer companies to other formations for various tasks. For example I was, for a time, attached to 50th Division’s coun-ter-intelligence section to search out and capture enemy agents; Baron was attached to an infantry battalion. In the novel the battalion is called the Fifth Wessex and the names of the officers and men are made up. The real battalion was the Fifth Wiltshires, part of the 43rd Wes-sex Division. The battle described by Barron in the novel for the capture of Mont Pincon actually took place and the incidents described in the novel have been vouched for as accurate by actual members of the battalion at the time.

The novel is not about the actual fighting alone; the larger part of it paints a picture of what happens in between battles and before: the training, the discipline, the bore-dom; about how the military machine uproots individuals, throws them together in new environments and forces them to establish new personal relationships. The novel contains many living character sketches of seemingly quiet and timid individuals who grow in stature in the face of danger and hardships; of ‘tough’ individuals who break down under the strain. Baron is also very perceptive about relations between officers, non-commissioned officers and the ordinary soldiers and how the maintenance of disci-pline is more complex than the mere enforcement of rules and the punishment of misdemeanour and how officers and NCOs must win the respect of the men. The novel contains an account of a new ‘hard case’ joining the platoon, a repeat offender who has seen the inside of many civil and military prisons and of the battle of wills between him and the pla-toon sergeant. The sergeant must not lose face and the re-spect of the rest of the platoon by allowing the newcomer openly to flout his orders. But he also must not ‘pull rank’ and provoke permanent enmity and resentment — after all some officers and NCOs have received a bullet in the back in battle situations — and he must also retain the respect and support of the rest of the platoon. In the end, the ser-geant wins the battle of wills and integrates the awkward soldier within the unit.

Baron’s novel is not ‘political’ in the ordinary sense. His characters do not talk politics, have little to say on their attitude to the war. For them the war is one of the facts of life; like the weather, they can do nothing about it but en-dure it. Their loyalty is not to king or country but to their immediate mates, their platoon, their battalion. Of course they are frightened; who would not be? But they can’t af-ford to panic; each man has a job to do whether it is crouching in a slit trench firing at the enemy, clearing mines or bringing up the rations. There is an incident in the novel where a corporal cook and a soldier are bringing up a dixie of tea to the front-line soldiers and are fired on by a sniper. The corporal-cook and his mate unsling their rifles, shoot the sniper, pick up the dixie and deliver the still hot tea to their mates in the front line.

But though not ‘political’ in one sense, the book is in-tensely political in so far as it paints a picture of what war was really like for thousands, nay millions, of soldiers on both sides. A very similar book could have been written about the German soldiers facing Baron’s characters. Of course Germany was Nazi and Britain was supposed to be fighting for ‘democracy’, but Baron’s soldiers and their


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German ‘enemies’ shared the same fears and the same expe-riences. Longden gives us a glimpse of Baron’s feelings in his introduction:

The fighting in Normandy exposed Baron to vicious warfare, with all the horrors that came with it: al-most constant noise, the loss of friends, the grip of fear, the sight of hideously bloated corpses and the all-pervading smell of death. It opened his eyes to the tremendous waste of life. One particular sight remained with Baron throughout his life. Looking back at his time in Normandy, Baron recalled being

surrounded by the corpses of German soldiers. He was struck by the struggle between his belief in Communism and his feelings about the war. He was still a Communist in 1944, but later he looked back at the fate of the dead Germans and saw them as doomed youth who had been, he said, ‘misled like me by the same blind faith and poisoned by wicked lies’.

Reading this book, and now reviewing it brings back many memories for me. Fare well comrade corporal Joe Bernstein! Harry Ratner

Letters

Stalinism and Revolution

Dear Editor Just some brief comments on Paul Flewers’ response to my ‘Stalinism, War and Revolution’ in New Interventions, Vol-ume 13, no 2 and Laurens Otter’s letter in Volume 13, no 3.

I think Paul very well explains the dilemma facing the leadership of the Soviet Union from 1917 onwards of recon-ciling the desire to spread revolution internationally and the need to find a modus vivendi with the capitalist nations in order to safeguard the new Soviet state from capitalist aggression. I agree that eventually the diplomatic needs of the USSR gradually took precedence over promoting inter-national revolution. But this was a gradual — or more accu-rately a step by step — process. The failure of revolution in Germany accelerated the process but the total abandon-ment of revolution in the West was probably not completed until the Laval-Stalin treaty with France in 1935 and the adoption of the Popular Front policy. I accept that by then the Moscow leadership had probably consciously decided that international revolution was not on and the prime objective was the survival of the USSR as a nation-state.

However the communist parties were a different kettle of fish. The French, Italian, Belgian, British workers and others who joined these parties were motivated primarily by the desire to see communism triumph in their countries and world-wide. (Certainly those who joined during the

class-against-class period and before the turn to the Popu-lar Front. In Reluctant Revolutionary I stressed the differ-ence between these members and for example the Jewish members who joined during the 1930s and the Second World War who saw the communist parties and the Red Army as their defenders against anti-Semitic Nazism.) The pre-1936 joiners were certainly subjectively revolutionary.

Also we must make a distinction between these and the Thorezes and Togliattis who were completely subservient to Moscow. Laurens Otter says I make a distinction be-tween Thorez and Togliatti, and Tito, Tillon and Marty. Yes I do and rightly so. The fact that wartime conditions had interrupted Moscow’s communications with local Stalinists is not the whole explanation. There was a genuine tension within the communist parties between the revolutionary aspirations of its members and the policies imposed by Moscow through the agency of the Thorezes and Togliattis.

One further thought. Suppose the Cold War had devel-oped into a hot war — when peaceful coexistence had ceased to be an option? This was always a possibility (vide the Cuban missile crisis). Then we might have had the war–revolution scenario envisaged by Michel Pablo — in which the communist parties in the West might have been pushed into a civil war (as happened in Yugoslavia). That is if any organised movement could have existed in a nuclear-devastated Europe. Harry Ratner

Paul Flewers

The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet

Union, 1929-1941

An exciting book by a New Interventions Editorial Board member

299 pages, £12.99 from Francis Boutle Publishers, 272 Alexandra Park Road, London N22 7BG

website: www.francisboutle.co.uk

What they say: ‘extensively researched’ — Weekly Worker; ‘an extremely

comprehensive survey’ — Permanent Revolution; ‘a very enjoyable book’ —

Jewish Socialist


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Riots: Fish Rot From the Head We had almost completed the finishing touches of this issue of New Interventions when serious rioting broke out on three consecutive evenings in London, followed by disturbances in other cities in Britain.

Why should the fatal shooting by the police of a young black man lead within little more than a day to the most se-rious rioting that Britain has seen for over 25 years? The shooting of someone by the police is still front-page news in Britain, it is still considered as a serious incident. When, as in this case, the question of race intrudes, then it often becomes a politically volatile matter. But this was different: something far more deep, far more fundamental oc-curred. It is clear that the shooting of Mark Duggan was a trigger, a catalyst, that ignited an extremely explosive mix-ture that had long been fermenting within Britain’s inner-city areas.

The usual explanations do not suffice. One can treat those coming from the right — that it was pure criminality — with contempt. They are deliberately evading the real issues. Liberals and left-wingers promote the idea that the Tory Coalition government’s austerity measures, particularly the public expenditure cuts that are closing youth clubs and especially those bodies trying to deal positively with teenage gangs, are fundamentally to blame, along with rising unemployment and the lack of genuine opportunities for youngsters, and police treatment of black youth. None of this can be discounted, but the truly visceral nature of this outburst cannot be explained by the closure of this or that facility or the lack of work, nor by the day-to-day actions of the police, which are a far cry from the widespread har-assment that lay behind the riots of 1981 (after all, Duggan was a known criminal, and was armed).

Unlike some anarchists, who see the riots as a carnival of the oppressed, socialists cannot be so sanguine. Riots express anger, but are no solution to the underlying problems. Their primal, explosive nature means that innocent people are hurt and even killed, small shops looted and put out of business, homes and local infrastructure damaged or destroyed. Community relations can be worsened, as, for example in North London, Turkish and Kurdish shop-owners systematically tooled up to repel (mainly) black would-be looters, and trust may be hard to rebuild. Sinister white vigilante groups lurked on the outskirts of urban areas. And, of course, the state will be using these disturbances to devise new ways to survey and control the population at large.

The current stage of capitalism, in which the worth of human activities is increasingly predicated upon whether they are immediately profitable, has resulted in social disaggregation. Old institutions, from the organised labour movement to organised religion, which in their various ways gave shape and coherence to society have declined and decayed, with nothing coming in to replace them. People feel more isolated these days, and current mores encourage a more self-centred attitude amongst people. All this, combined with long-term unemployment and social deprivation and the consequent feeling of hopelessness, has resulted in a certain degree of lumpenisation, especially amongst young people. Disaffected youth often attempt to deal with their situation through the fake solidarity of the local gang, which can bring them into criminal activities and further alienation from mainstream society. These young peo-ple have a deep hostility to the institutions of the state and to the political establishment, but one that is customarily expressed in anti-social attitudes and activities.

Fish rot from the head, and not just the Tories and their friends, but Labour too, will not be keen to point to a whole range of factors whose insidious consequences have seeped deeply into the pores of today’s Britain. Politicians and big-businessmen demand austerity from workers whilst jealously defending their own sizeable incomes. The Murdoch affair has shown how his empire established cosy relations with politicians and the police, and did not hesi-tate in breaking the law when tapping thousands of people’s telephones. Bankers kept their jobs and continue to pay themselves huge bonuses even after losing billions and having had to be bailed out by the state. Large numbers of well-paid MPs happily claimed excessive expenses or fiddled them outright. Successive British governments have thought nothing of attacking and invading foreign countries that posed no threat, and covering their reasons for so doing with lies worthy of Goebbels himself.

What are people to assume from this? That one can lie, fiddle, bribe, be hypocritical, break the law, attack others and generally act with impunity. If the rich and powerful are doing all this, when they are bending and breaking their own laws, then why should a young person, unemployed, treated with contempt by the authorities, with little sense of belonging to society, not feel that he has a right to lash out, to seize what he feels could be his? It is at first glance paradoxical that youth most alienated from society have acted in accordance with the national zeitgeist. But when the lessons implanted in society by the rich and powerful are ones of selfishness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, violence and outright criminality, then there is no mystery at all. Those at the bottom who are inclined towards anti-social behav-iour have seen it indulged in at the very top. And that is the central problem of the riots that we have seen in Britain: not only are they a destructive dead-end, they are both a product and a reflection of the fundamental rottenness of British capitalism. It will take a great deal more than reversing the Tory cuts to put things right. Arthur Trusscott