The decision by the Communication Workers Union{CWU} to enter talks at the conciliation service ACAS is a clear indication that it is looking to end the strike and capitulate to the demands of the Royal Mail.

It is no accident that the attempt by the CWU to end this strike coincides with two inter-related developments: the crisis in the Tory party, which has all the hallmarks of a revolutionary crisis developing in Britain and the growing strike movement that is threatening to grow out of the control of the Labour party and trade union bureaucracy.

For the last six weeks, the CWU has sent numerous begging letters to Royal Mail management pleading to be lenient and negotiate with the union, only for Royal Mail to ignore their pleas, escalate executive actions, and threaten mass redundancies. The redundancies are a clear attempt to intimidate postal workers from taking further strike action. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has made it clear that it will not mobilise postal workers against Royal Mail’s declaration of class warfare.

As Tony Robson points out, the union issued “an appeal for the Board to meet and discuss the union’s “alternative business plan”, framed as one offering greater profitability based on “utilising the competitive edge it has already in its deliveries to 32 million addresses across the country.”

Royal Mail’s agreement to talks is a ruse to buy more time to end strikes over the profitable Christmas period and to give the Tory government time to implement draconian anti-strike legalisation.

From the very first days of the strike, the union has put forward a pro-business agenda. David Ward, CWU leader, said shareholders were on the union’s side, boasting on a Facebook meeting that the union had held secret talks with VESA, the same private equity firm pushing through massive attacks on postal workers’ pay and conditions.

As for ACAS, the union is asking postal workers to put their faith in an anti-working class and pro-business organisation. It is not some independent organisation, but a mechanism used by big business to end strikes, as the Refuse workers in Coventry found to their cost[1]

The postal workers’ dispute is now in danger and threatened directly by the CWU bureaucracy’s corporatist strategy, posing the need for the rank and file to take charge. At every Royal Mail and Parcelforce depot, rank-and-file strike committees must be established to fight for the following:

·       An inflation-busting pay award, with all future pay automatically indexed to the RPI inflation rate

·       The immediate provision of strike pay for Royal Mail, BT and Openreach workers and Post Office workers to co-ordinate effective and sustained joint action

·       No negotiations with Royal Mail until all mass redundancies are withdrawn and all executive action ended over the revision of terms and conditions. Any further talks are to be live-streamed.

·       Reach out to Amazon workers who have launched wildcat action against sweatshop conditions in a united front of all delivery workers to defeat the race to the bottom

·       Royal Mail and Amazon must be nationalised, their profits confiscated to meet pressing social needs and their operations placed under the democratic control of workers.

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[1] ACAS sides with strike-breaking Coventry Labour council against refuse drivers-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/16/cove-m16.html

 “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

― Gustave Flaubert

Firstly apologies for the late publication of my article, The Global Attack on Postal workers. I put it on the website Royalmailchat[1] , achieving 800-page hits with four comments. The current struggle has started to get vicious, with Royal Mail starting to push 10,000 redundancies, and this is just the start of their attempt to Amazonistion the business. One significant development came out of the CWU’s Thursday Facebook meeting. While it is common knowledge that Royal Mail has held secret talks with the Private Equity Firm VESA, which is one of the powers behind the throne and is pulling the strings of the current CEO, Simon Thompson. It is not common knowledge that Terry Pullinger, the current CWU DGSP, also met with representatives of VESA. What was the purpose of this meeting, and what was discussed should be made public?

There are a few meetings and lectures worth mentioning this week. On Monday at Bookmarks, The SWP bookshop -Book Launch -Claude McKay -The Making of a Black Bolshevik-17^th October-6.30. On Tuesday at the London Review of Books Bookshop -Vigdis Hjorth & Shahidha Bari: Is Mother Dead-Vigdis Hjorth discusses her new novel, Is Mother Dead (Verso) with Shahidha Bari. 7 pm. Writings of Oliver Cromwell- Woburn Suite, G22/26, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 20 October 2022, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

A couple of things from correspondence received this week. F Mami is a regular contributor to my website. See his latest article[2]. Fouad is looking for paid work for his writings, so if any media people are reading this, let me know if you are interested. Contact me at the following email keith@atrumpetofsedition.org.

CT sent an email regarding the Christopher Hill conference. I think we are both outsiders to this event, and it would be good if we both did articles on the conference from differing perspectives. I am reviewing the book A World Turn Upside Down before the meeting. It would be nice if Verso of Penguinb did an anniversary issue, but I will not hold my breath. My next review for my website will be David Caute’s The Red List.

A couple of important articles were published on wsws.org. The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II by Clara Weiss[3] and Eugene V. Debs and the struggle of railroaders-by Tom Mackaman[4]

Again a few new books were purchased this week. The People Immortal-Vasily Grossman. A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto Hardcover – 12 May 2022-by China Miéville

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[1] https://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/home.php

[2] http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2022/10/reynolds-nicholas-2022-need-to-know.html

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/10/debs-o10.html

Nicholas Reynolds is a historian. Need to Know traces the rise of what ultimately has become known as the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most famous intelligence body among the eighteen spy institutions in the U.S.

Given the lure and stature the CIA enjoys today, readers may easily think that the process promulgated in creating the spying structure had been smooth or problem-free. After all, why the fuzz as the country needed a professional spy agency like no other and similar to similar agencies in the rest of the world? But the story about the CIA creation is radically different from this perceived wisdom for reasons Reynolds specifically outlines in this exceptional 500-plus pages. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to grasp the hard knocks of the birth that marked the preliminaries of what is now the solid institution without which the U.S. cannot be imagined.

For beginners in intelligence history, Reynolds’s story makes sense only when knowing that before World War II, the U.S. did not have a permanent spy institution for a century and a half of its existence. Strange as it seems now, since its inception, the country’s founding fathers have opposed the spying principle. The Puritans’ bent on starting the City upon a Hill morphed into distancing their polity from disgraceful and cheap practices of the old world, a situation that U.S. elites and insiders of the establishment throughout U.S. history could not easily untangle until the advent of WWII.

In contrast, with WWII and the U.S. general mood dramatically changing in favour of less isolationism and more involvement in world affairs, the U.S. granted permission to eavesdrop on enemies’ communication traffic. All these and more, Reynolds elaborates, showing politicians’ extreme caution and suspicion of this change in state policy, precisely the bias, against spying as the backbone underlying state policy for accessing information. In licensing a spying agency, a free hand could have spurred undesired consequences and turned the promise of the City upon a Hill into yet another corrupt and degenerate polity of the old world. 

With this background in mind, we understand the difficulties, the hesitations, and the half-hearted beginnings of what will become during and particularly after WWII, the U.S. intelligence taking an industrial scale. We read that even when he favoured founding a body that could provide answers and offer policymakers an advantage when negotiating with representatives of foreign governments, President Roosevelt had always resisted replicating British or European intelligence structures.

With the ongoing war in Europe, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940 and certainly, before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, FDR authorized Colonel Willian J. Donovan to form what was for him more or less an amateur spy body, compared to the British MI6 and in parallel to already existing institutions such as Military Intelligence Division (MID), Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and of course the FBI. A key preoccupation for FDR is the management of the massive traffic, literally the tons of sensitive information reaching his office. The administration is ideally carried out through coordination between the already existing structures. In addition to the coordination task, the Colonel has in mind an additional task dear to his heart, the planning and executing undercover operations.

In June 1941, Roosevelts signed the order to create the Coordinator of Information COI amidst opposition and resistance from the FBI and other intelligence bodies (those of the Army and the Navy). Like with all novel experiences, the established bureaucracies did not welcome the newborn arrival for fear it would dwarf their work as COI was placed directly under the White House. The intrigues in the hierarchy will oblige Roosevelt to transform the new baby into OSS (Office of Strategic Service) under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Put in charge of the budding institution, Donovan had to work twice as hard as other intelligence organizations to prove to his superiors the usefulness of the new establishment. One must remember that the new establishment was functioning amidst competing and the ever-suspicious Military, Navy, and FBI. Because they could break codes about Japanese diplomatic and military traffic, the Navy and the Army saw little utility in Donovan’s body. Besides, they wanted to protect their code-breaking enterprises. This explains how they were mortally obsessed with safekeeping, a substantial advantage over the enemy, thanks to their code-breaking. Hence why they resisted full cooperation with Denovan’s agency.

Donovan’s tours in Britain gave him the incentive to founding an American equivalent to the deeply entrenched British intelligence services. Ever eager to actively participate in the war, Donovan’s early mission as head of the COI had been in China and India after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the far east. His collaboration with the British helped enlist American and local sabotage operations behind enemy lines. His real contribution as head of OSS, for which decision-makers in Washington were thrilled, comes in the context of the landing in Normandy, the liberation of France, and the arrangement of German army defection in northern Italy in the early months of 1945.

Still, with FDR’s death in April 1945 and the end of hostilities in the European war theatre, Donovan and his structure fell out of favour. Again, the fall was not for lack of pertinent reasons. While the new administration seized on the key role of intelligence in shortening the length of the war and with recommendations from the Navy and Army, it still wanted to restructure OSS by distributing its staff among the Navy, Army, and the State Department. President Truman found out that a real restructuring has to begin with relieving Donovan from his duties while awarding him for the achievements that have given an edge to the Allies’ war efforts.

For precision’s sake, Reynolds specifies that Truman bore no ill feelings against Donovan or OSS. That policy can be explained only by the old American bias against intelligence which reemerged after the victory in WWII. Truman was afraid that the exceptional success of intelligence could propagate to make the U.S., just like other European democracies, drift in peaceful times toward dictatorship because intelligence could not control its ambitions.

Reynolds’ writing in this book is conversational, and as such, it is engaging. His chit-chat style delves into what initially looks like secondary bits or extended biographies, all for exploring pertinent backgrounds. The reading of Need to Know flies because its author is careful about providing the right environment. The extensive endnotes and bibliography entries at the end underline the author’s passion, who wanted to translate how a central intelligence structure has never been systematic or planned from the start. Quite the contrary, if anything, Reynolds’ narrative illustrates that the process that was promulgated in 1947 to what had become the CIA has been through trial-and-error, accommodating how policymakers variedly (some slowly; others quickly) registered American victory not only against the axis forces but also against America’s Allies in 1945. Marshalling the mindset to seize on that exceptional victory had to end in a central intelligence agency in which COI and OSS serve as excellent precursors. 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

Employing over 115,000 Royal Mail workers, Royal Mail is currently undertaking a fundamental restructuring of its core business. It aims to concentrate on the lucrative parcel market and ditch its responsibility for letter delivery. It would appear to be deliberately trashing this side of the business to sell it to any private equity firm greedy enough to buy it. The 500-year-old company has also changed its name to International Distributions Services plc.

To undertake this restructuring, it is carrying out a vicious attack on postal workers’ pay and conditions that is unprecedented in this industry in modern times. Along with other wholesale changes, it demands new delivery schedules to compete with parcel delivery services such as Amazon, which employs a super-exploited gig workforce. Royal Mail wants delivery rounds to start two hours later each day, from 9 am, with the last post at 7 pm or later. It wants compulsory Sunday work. If successful, it will amount to the Amazonisation of the postal service.

Worldwide postal networks are also launching systematic and widescale privatisation of their core businesses. Two related developments are driving this privatisation process or Post Office reform. Firstly, the exponential growth of electronic mail has placed massive demands on postal services worldwide to cut costs and improve efficiency to remain competitive. Computers now generate over 80 per cent of all correspondence sent.

Secondly, the globalisation of trade and industry facilitated by these same technological developments has torn the ground from under the postal service as a nationally based venture. Whereas the post Office once enjoyed monopoly status as a domestic carrier, today, it is forced to compete at home and abroad against its international rivals.

Postal companies around the world are, in the words of a UNI Global Report adopting “solutions aimed at optimising deliveries, such as the outsourcing of delivery services, the prior quantification of tasks using software tools (geo-routing13), the introduction of alternate day delivery, the questioning of the “tenure” of delivery rounds, the non-physical delivery of registered mail, the extension of delivery rounds and, for some operators, the total or partial integration of parcels and letters into one delivery stream. Some postal and parcel operators are also starting to introduce new low-cost (“uberized”) flexible delivery models such as crowdsourcing which allows deliveries to be organised locally or even nationally (for the moment, mainly in the US, the UK and Belgium”.

Given the globalised nature of the postal industry, it is not surprising that the attacks on British postal workers are mirrored worldwide. Across the channel, postal workers in France have come under sustained attacks from La Poste. Like postal workers around the globe, French postal workers joined their fellow workers during the Covid 19 pandemic playing an ever more “essential” role as they deliver food, medications, money, communications, and much more to millions of homes. Like their global counterparts, French postal workers have been treated as if their lives have no value, and thousands of postal workers were infected with many deaths. Since 2012 there have been 19 suicides or attempted suicides of postal workers.

La Poste is in many ways ahead of its European competitors in undertaking a massive restructuring of its business model to compete with its international rivals. It was one of the first European postal services to change the start times of its postal workers from 6 am to 8 am to compete with its rivals in the lucrative parcels business. This has ended the “job and finish” principle, something Royal Mail in the UK is keen to duplicate.

To offset the decline in Letters, La Poste has, According to a UNI Global Union report, now has postal workers doing “new services such as “Watch over my parents”, home delivery of errands, meals or medicines, technical or administrative help (help with tax return forms, installation of TV decoders).[1] Most drivers at La Poste’s subsidiary DPD are self-employed, and La Poste has shed over 70,000 of its postal workers.

“La Poste has considerably expanded its European express delivery network through investments in new technologies and a series of external acquisitions (Seur, Exapaq, Pickup Services Siodemka, among others). DPD is now the second-largest operator in Europe behind Deutsche Post DHL, with a market share estimated at 12.9% (with leading positions in several European markets such as Germany, the UK, France, Poland and Portugal). La Poste is also investing outside Europe (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkey, China and Africa, and South and North America), intending to become a major player in the global e-commerce supply chain. About a quarter of La Poste turnover is already realised on foreign markets.”[2]

The German Postal Service was privatised in 1989. It is hell-bent on cutting costs, including introducing low-paid contracts similar to its private business rivals, to furnish the German financial elite with increased dividends and facilitate its business expansion into foreign markets.

In Belgium, Bpost has already attempted the Uberisation of its core business. According to the Uni Global Study, “In 2016, Bpost launched Bringr, an innovative, collaborative platform app allowing smartphone users to find a driver for delivering goods. According to the company, Bringr aims to complement Bpost’s existing product range with a service that enables users to find a driver to pick up goods at point A and deliver them to point B. First developed in the USA and the uK, this crowdsourced delivery model, which works on the same principle as popular driving (Uber) or grocery or food delivery services (Uber Eats, Deliveroo), are becoming increasingly popular among delivery companies as it satisfies consumers’ growing demands for faster online deliveries while at the same time decreasing the cost of last-mile delivery by lowering labour and other fixed expenses.[3] Over 10% of its workforce is agency workers. In Poland, like its western counterparts, the Polish postal services face fierce competition from its rivals. Many competitors have a low-cost business method with low fixed costs and cheap labour. In Sweden, over 29,000 jobs have been lost due to the reorganisation of the Swedish postal network. Posten AB closed all post offices by 2002 and replaced them with so-called business centres and postal contact points located in grocery stores, filling stations, kiosks etc.

Like many postal workers around the world, postal workers in Sweden were fearful of the new changes, according to the Uni Global report: “Working conditions have also suffered. A SECO study team visited 800 Swedish Post and CityMail workplaces. These visits confirmed problems of stress and heavy workloads. According to the study, “the most distressing observation was the anxiety about the future expressed by most employees. This situation has increased in long-term absence, the increased incidence of occupational illness and high employee turnover”.

In New Zealand, in 1998, the Postal Services Act ended the statutory monopoly of New Zealand Post (NZ Post) to carry letters, opening the postal market to full competition. NZ Post, to reduce cost {Royal Mail in the UK is seeking to do the same} is using self-employed workers for certain tasks. Many other duties are now being outsourced to companies with low wages and poor working conditions. This has led to over 5000 job losses since 2013. Australia Post The Australian government is conducting a restructuring of Australia Post that threatens 2,000 jobs. Many workers have been punished for speaking out on COVID-19 conditions

In Canada, Casual labour is rife at Canada Post, with 32 per cent of staff part-time, and the lack of full-time jobs has led to an escalation of casual work. An article on wsws.org reports, “Postal workers endure demanding and dangerous working conditions, including forced overtime and an accident rate that is more than five times the norm in federally regulated industries. Canada Post is using technological change to increase postal workers’ workloads further while slashing jobs. Backed by the Conservative government’s 2011 back-to-work law, it slashed pension benefits and expanded multi-tier employment.”[4]

In the United States, President Joe Biden recently signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which will see the health care benefits of US postal workers slashed. The APWU and the other postal unions have regularly aided and abetted management attacks of wages and conditions and have fully supported the cuts in health care costs.

Brazil is in the final stages of privatising the state-owned postal office Correios, after a nationwide 35-day strike was sabotaged by the postal unions in September. In a previous strike in In 2014, Postal Union workers came out of strike over the transfer of the post’s healthcare system to a new management agency. In Brazil, postal workers’ wages and salaries are among the lowest in Brazilian state-owned companies.

In the United Kingdom, With the average wage of a Royal Mail Letters Operational Grade postal worker set at a measly £22,589, nearly £5000 below the national wage, postal workers have for the last decade or so been in a constant and fierce battle to defend and improve their pay and workers conditions. As was outlined at the beginning of this article, they face an employer who is hell-bent on destroying their hard-fought pay and benefits. The result of two decades of Royal Mail restructuring and then privatisation in 2013 has reduced jobs by 44,000. With the direct collaboration of the CWU, the company has seen the wholesale looting of the pension and the establishment of a new two-tier pension that will see new starters on a worse pension than their fellow workers. It has replaced its defined benefit pension scheme with a sub-standard arrangement. Postal workers have launched serious strikes to defend their pay and working conditions. The Communication Workers Union {CWU} has utilised the strikes as a bargaining counter to force Royal Mail to the negotiating table.

Like their counterparts around the globe, the CWU, far from defending postal workers from Royal Mail’s rapacious attacks, have aided and abetted this process. As Eric London writes, “The trade unions, controlled by massive bureaucracies that are entirely integrated into the structures of the state and finance capital, serve as instruments of imperialism, and are working in every country with the corporations and capitalist parties to suppress this growing movement and to isolate the most militant struggles. The task that directly confronts the working class is to smash the bureaucratic dictatorship and transfer power to the rank and file.[5]

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the International Committee of the Fourth International in May 2021,  calls on all postal workers to break from their union leader and set up their organisations independent of the union bureaucracy in order to coordinate and draw together all the disparate struggles of the international working class into one unified world movement. Above all, what is needed is the building of a socialist leadership to direct the emerging struggles in the direction of a challenge to the capitalist system and imperialist war.

Sources

1.   Correspondence on the privatisation of Britain’s postal service-24 August 2002- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/08/corr-a24.pdf

2.   The Economic And Social Consequences of Postal Services Liberalisation – Uni Global study

3.   Canada Post workers need a socialist strategy to defy and defeat Liberals’ back-to-work law- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/11/24/cupw-n24.html

Notes

1.   Masters of the Post: The Authorised History of the Royal Mail Hardcover – 3 Nov. 2011by Duncan Campbell-Smith 

2.   LONDON POSTAL WORKERS A TRADE UNION HISTORY 1839–2000 Kindle Edition-by Norman Candy

3.   Scratching the Surface: Posties, Privatisation and Strikes in the Royal Mail Paperback – 29 Aug. 2014 -by Phil ChadwickThe Meaning of Militancy?: Postal Workers and Industrial Relations (Routledge Revivals) Hardcover – 27 Oct. 2017-by Gregor

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[1] The Economic And Social Consequences of Postal Services Liberalisation – Uni Global study

[2] The Economic And Social Consequences of Postal Services Liberalisation – Uni Global study www.syndex.fr

[3] THE Economic And Social Consequences of Postal Services Liberalisation – Uni Global study- www.syndex.fr

[4] Canada Post workers need socialist strategy to defy and defeat Liberals’ back-to-work law- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/11/24/cupw-n24.html

[5] The global strike wave and the crisis of revolutionary leadership- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/05/xsob-o05.htm

A long time ago, back in the day when I was more radical than I am now, a very important person high up in the political organisation I used to be in called Julie gave me one of the best pieces of advice: concentrate well on one book at a time. I had a habit of moving on to one book while finishing another, and I still have this bad habit.

As the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky once said, “It is better to read one book and read it well; it is better to master a little bit at a time and master it thoroughly. Only in this way will your powers of mental comprehension extend themselves naturally. Thought will gradually gain confidence in itself and grow more productive. With these preliminaries in mind, it will not be difficult to rationally allot your time. Then, the transition from one pursuit to another will be to a certain extent pleasurable.”[1]

I raise this issue because I am currently reading two books, although one is read inside the house and the other is on my travels. Both books are biographies of the writer. Phillip Roth, so it counts as reading one book, albeit with nearly 1500 pages. My outdoor read is Ira Nadel- Philip Roth, A Counterlife. So far, I have only read the introduction, but it seems to be a character assassination of Roth.

 The whole introduction concentrates on why Roth was an angry man and how it dominated his worldview. Nadel’s attempted use of psychoanalysis to unlock the secrets of Roth’s behaviour has grown tiresome after only twenty pages. Nadel appears to join a long line of people who seem to object to Roth’s worldview. I believe that Roth wrote many extremely important books and understood the world, which is worth reading. As Roth said, “At any rate, all I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it.”– My Life as a Man.

Although the Christopher Hill Conference in London is not until November, I decided to buy the latest copy of The World Turned Upside Down. Given that I read it long ago, it might be time to review it for my website. CT has kindly sent me two articles which are pertinent to the conference. Email me if you want copies. Ann Talbot wrote a superb obituary of Hill. It would be nice to expand on some of her points and publish them before the conference. I doubt if I sent it to the conference, they would accept an orthodox Marxist position on Hill, so I will not bother to send it.  [2]

Further book purchases include The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, which I will review later. The books I intend to review are getting longer, so please chip in if anyone has a little free time. Three books from Verso are Will and Testament-A Novel-by Vigdis Hjorth-Translated by Charlotte Barslund, Is Mother Dead-by Vigdis Hjorth, and last I Fear My Pain Interests You-A Novel-by Stephanie LaCava

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[1] (A letter to the Kiev comrades. From Pravda, May 31, 1923. Translated for this volume from Collected Works, Vol. 2 1, by Marilyn Vogt. From: Problems of Every Day Life by Leon Trotsky.)

[2] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher HillAnn Talbot-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

This is the first post in what I hope will be an occasional meandering of thoughts and things happening in my world.

I have started reading Blake Bailey’s fantastic biography of Philip Roth again. I have admired Roth since I read his book I Married A Communist, and Bailey’s publisher has since burnt his book. I wrote about that.[1] The Roth bio is a superb piece, and it takes you away from your world and submerges you into Roth’s world. Sometime in the future, I will review it for my website alongside another book on Roth by Ira Nadel, which has a better cover. I wouldn’t say I like the cover of Bailey’s book, and it remains to be seen if Nadel’s book is better.

Much as I try to limit the number of books I buy every month, I am like a heroin addict who needs a fix. I go cold turkey every so often, and this is a list of recent buys, books, not heroin. 1. Three books by Hubert Selby JR-Requiem for a Dream, Last Exit to Brooklyn and The demon. 2. Ham on Rye-Charles Bukowski. 3. The Midnight Library, this one I succumbed to Sainsbury’s charms at £3.99. Portable Magic-Emma Smith-this one looks a beauty.4. On Nineteen Eighty Four-D J Taylor, the biography of Orwell’s masterpiece. 5. State Capitalism in Russia, Tony Cliff. A new edition which I will review at some point in the future. Vagina-Naomi Wolf- Speakes for itself. At my age don’t see much of it to comment on.6 Insolent Proceedings-edited by Peter Lake and Jason Peacey. I am working on a review of this book.7. Blood and Power- John Foot. With a Fascist elected as Italian President, this book could not be more topical.[2]8. Class, Women Race and Class-Angela Davis. 9 The Making of a Black Bolshevik – Claude McKay.

My friend Christopher Thompson who is my eyes and ears, alerted me to the Christopher Hill conference, which I have now advertised on this website. While I am not surprised that I was not invited to speak, it would have been nice to have an orthodox Marxist take on Hill.

My latest article should be published on Sunday called  Globalisation, Privatisation and the worldwide struggle of Postal Workers.

1] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2021/05/comment-what-ever-happened-to-innocent.html

[2] Mussolini’s heirs return to power in Italy  www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/27/lhwy-s27.html

 “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.

The communist Manifesto-Karl Marx

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”

Barbara W. Tuchman-August 1914

“if the King were in the body of the enemy, he would as soon discharge his pistol upon him as upon any private man,” and if they did not think likewise, they ought not to enlist under him.”

Oliver Cromwell

“The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment’s most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life.”

Georgi Plekhanov

God save the Queen, She’s not a human being, and There’s no future And England’s dreaming

God Save the Queen-Sex Pistols

Why was the life of Elizabeth II the cause of so much love and adoration? It begs the question, what exactly was her contribution to humanity? After all, she lived a long and privileged life. She was a billionaire with more money than most people can dream of and belonged to a family that deeply sympathised with the Nazis. Remember Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform. Or the picture in the tabloid press of members of the Royal family giving Nazi salutes.

As for the funeral, as Chris Marsden says, it takes place amidst the spectre of war and revolution.[1] Marsden’s excellent article delves into history to expose the absurdity of the whole affair. Speaking of a previous royal funeral, that of  Edward VII, the American historian Barbara W. Tuchman says in the book The Guns of August,  “The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”

Another article on wsws.org examines the bourgeoisie’s sudden deep love affair with the royals. Joseph Scalice’s scathing article points out that  “Monarchy is an institution of colossal stupidity, a barbaric relic of the feudal past; its persistence is an embarrassment to humanity. Founded on heredity, shored up with inbreeding, intermarriage and claims of divine right, the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity. It maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power.”[2]

Although the English bourgeoisie buried “the ghosts of its republican ancestors long ago”, that time was the 17^th century when things were different. Then the  English bourgeoisie killed a king, established a republic and got rid of the house of lords, a tad different from today’s fawning over a bunch of crooks, child traffickers and Nazi lovers.

The English bourgeoisie does not like to be reminded of its revolutionary past. As the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov wrote in his extremely perceptive essay:

“The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment’s most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life. England passed through her revolutionary storms in the seventeenth century, and there were then two revolutions: the first led, among other things, to the execution of Charles I, while the second ended with an animated banquet and the rise of a new dynasty.

But the English bourgeoisie, in the evaluation of these revolutions, manifests very divergent views: while the first, in its eyes, does not even deserve the name ‘revolution’ and is simply referred to as ‘the great rebellion, the second is given a more euphonious appellation; it is called ‘the glorious revolution. The secret of this differentiation in evaluating the two revolutions has already been revealed by Augustin Thierry in his theses about the English revolutions. In the first revolution, the people played an important role, while in the second, the people participated hardly at all. When, however, a people mount the stage of history and begin to decide the destinies of their country according to its power and best understanding, then the higher classes (in this case, the bourgeoisie) get out of humour. Because the people are always ‘raw’ and, if the revolutionary devil begins to pervade it, also becomes ‘coarse’, the higher classes have a way of always insisting upon politeness and gentle manners—at least they demand these of the people. This is why the higher classes are always inclined to put upon revolutionary movements if prominently participated in by the people, the stamp of ‘rebellions’.[3]

It is not only the English bourgeoisie that would like to see the English revolution buried along with its brief republican past. As Leon Trotsky wrote, many historians have sought to ” vulgarise the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.” These historians have not exactly covered themselves in glory over the death of Elizabeth II.

Historian Clive Irving who is not exactly a Marxist called the funeral a ‘façade’ and said that the Royal Family should ‘atone’ for slavery. Irving said the Royal Africa Company, founded by Charles II in 1666, “concealed a very evil enterprise which was shipping slaves from Africa to the Caribbean colonies.’Not exactly calling for a Marxist insurrection to replace the Monarchy, but this did not stop the torrent of abuse he received from several sycophantic historians

“Zareer Masani, a historian and author, responded to Irving’s comments by saying: ‘His comments are pretty old hat because these kinds of comments have been made about the Monarchy for the last decade by Black Lives Matter and those sorts of groups. I don’t see anything new. The Empire was overall very positive for most parts of the world. There were mistakes and violence in pockets, but on the whole, it was a benevolent institution which gave most of the world foundations for modern nationhood and economy. I don’t think it has anything to apologise for.’

Perhaps the most stupid and crass comment came from one historian who wrote, “‘The British crown stand above politics and outside politics, both domestic and international.[4] At last, the Queen has a fitting epitaph.

Working people need to wake up and smell the coffee, the Monarchy is no friend of the working class. In Requiem For a Dream, Hubert Selby Jr writes, “Eventually we all have to accept total responsibility for our actions, everything we have and has not done. I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we can mourn its passing”.

Notes

Edward VII – King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India (1841-1910)

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/19/srjc-s19.html

[2] The adulation for Elizabeth II: The capitalist class celebrates the principle of monarchy-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/17/pers-s17.html

[3] George Plekhanov-The Bourgeois Revolution-The Political Birth of Capitalism

[4] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11231847/Queens-funeral-Historians-slam-royal-biographers-comments-state-funeral-fa-ade.html

“There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation, instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.”

The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt” (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe.

“If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start, they might be miles away from one another, and yet eventually, we are bound to meet. We can’t avoid it.”

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate

It is perhaps an understatement to say that Robert Harris is a remarkably versatile and clever writer. He has written numerous books on wide-ranging subjects such as Ancient Rome and The Second World War and a book set 800 years in the future. Titles including ‘Fatherland’, ‘Munich’ and ‘An Officer and a Spy.

His latest narrative-driven book examines one of the most contentious periods in British, if not world history, The English Revolution. It is well-written and researched.

The book covers Charles I execution and the subsequent pursuit of two leading regicides who signed the king’s death warrant. Colonel Will Goffe and Edward Whalley were exiled to America in 1660, where they were welcomed with open arms by many colonists who were Puritans and had supported their political stance against the king. Both men were high-ranking soldiers in the New Model Army, and Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin. Both played an important part in the successful English revolution.

Harris’s book treads an already well-trodden path. The last few years alone have seen numerous books on the subject covered in his book.[1]The book appears well researched, but Harris, like many other historians, has found a dearth of information about what Walley and Goffe did in America. So like all good writers, he makes things up and employs a method favoured by the 18^th-century writer, poet and philosopher Novalis, who wrote, “There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events to seem imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect.”[2]

Regarding historiography, the book is part of a new wave of studies, both fiction and non-fiction, concentrating on different aspects of the Royalist cause in the 17^th century.

Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticised by some historians. In the foreword of  the 2011 edition, Clive Holmes said: “Wedgwood’s relationship with academic historians was not an easy one, and the immediate reception of this work by the professionals in their flagship journals was cool and even condescending.”

While Harris’s invention of the character Richard Naylor is legitimate and interesting, one can’t help feeling that Harris is trying to persecute the two regicides again. He seems a bit miffed that they escaped the so-called royal justice of Charles II. Further hostility came from the pen of the Guardian newspaper, Andrew Taylor writes, “It’s not easy to make Whalley and Goffe sympathetic to a modern sensibility. They were hardcore Puritans who believed that only the elect would go to heaven, that their aggressively righteous ends justified their often ruthless means and that the world would end in 1666.”[3]

Just like their modern counterparts, the late 17th  English bourgeoisie would rather forget their revolution of the 1640s; hence The 1660 Act of Oblivion(the title of the book), was an act of parliament supported by Charles II to draw a line under the events of the 1640s and pretend they never happened.

‘The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men’s bodies”: the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But it cannot be denied that the killing of the king had, as Ann Talbot recounts, “a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a dreadful mistake, no monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria’s reign”.

Also as Christopher Hill put it so well, “In 1660 passive obedience was preached in all pulpits; a King was brought back “with plenty of holy oil about him,” because this was necessary for Parliament, for the possessing classes, threatened by social revolution from below. A white terror was introduced by the returned émigrés, and an attempt was made to drive from political life all who did not accept the restored régime in Church and State (the Clarendon Code, the Test Act). Educational advances, like the purge which had made Oxford a centre of scientific research, were reversed. All this broke the revolutionary-democratic movement for the moment, though it fought back again in the sixteen-seventies and -eighties. In 1662 a Presbyterian minister, who had been deprived of his living by the Restoration, wrote in words that recaptured the fears of many respectable members of the possessing classes at that time: “Though soon after the settlement of the nation we saw ourselves the despised and cheated party … yet in all this, I have suffered since, I look upon it as less than my trouble was from my fears then … Then we lay at the mercy and impulse of a giddy, hot-headed, bloody multitude.”[4]

Harris’s book, albeit fictitious in parts, shows that this manhunt dominated the reign of Charles II. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognised the growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in giving a public funeral to one of the regicides. Over twenty thousand people attended, testifying to the still considerable support for Republican ideas.

Conclusion

One of the difficulties of writing about this period of English history is that, as one writer put it, “intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience”. But Harris’s book is timely as the United Kingdom is living through a period of constitutional upheaval and faces the distinct possibility of breaking up. Act of Oblivion is an enjoyable read and has a ring of authenticity. It is pointless recommending this book, and Harris’s books sell in the millions, but it is a good read.

Notes

1.   The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 was an Act of the Parliament of England (12 Cha. II c. 11), the long title of which is “An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion”. This act was a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and subsequent Commonwealth period, with the exception of certain crimes such as murder (without a licence granted by the King or Parliament), piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and people named in the act such as those involved in the regicide of Charles I. It also said that no action was to be taken against those involved at any later time and that the Interregnum was to be legally forgotten.

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[1] See Charles I’s Executioners -Civil War, Regicide and the Republic By James Hobson- Pen & Sword History-Published: 4th November 2020. https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2021/04/charles-is-executioners-civil-war.html andKillers of the King – The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Hardcover – Charles Spencer 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing – ISBN-13: 978-1408851708-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2014/10/killers-of-king-men-who-dared-to_23.html

[2] The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt” (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/08/act-of-oblivion-by-robert-harris-review-regicides-on-the-run

[4] The English Revolution 1640- https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/