A proverbial saying, early 20th century, meaning that one’s chosen style reflects one’s essential characteristics; earlier in Latin, and the French naturalist Buffon (1707–88) in the form, ‘Style is the man himself.’
“Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege”.
Leon Trotsky
At the end of the film The Shawshank Redemption,[1] Andy Dufresne escapes from the prison in the night by crawling through the sewer pipe and escaping into a nearby river. Reviewing this book has a similar feel to it.
The author of this book Jim Higgins (1930-2002), began his political life as a member of the British Communist Party. He left in 1956 after reading Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’, which denounced the crimes of Stalin. Nothing is mentioned in this book about Higgin’s life in the Stalinist Communist Party.
It is true that Higgins read “voraciously” the writings of Leon Trotsky but appears to have learnt nothing from then accept he did not agree with orthodox Marxism. Therefore it is a little strange that he joined Gerry Healy’s The Club that became the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers Revolutionary Party. The Club played an important role in major industrial struggles and within the Labour Party, especially the movement in opposition to the development of the H-Bomb. In 1958, the youth paper Keep Left was relaunched monthly, and members were sent into the Labour Party’s youth movement, the Young Socialists. Higgins almost immediately formed a faction against the leadership.
Although Higgin’s book purports to be a history of the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), he spends an inordinate amount of time and space attacking the SLL and Healy, which makes me believe that Higgin’s joined the wrong party by mistake. It seems pretty clear he was never a Trotskyist and retained much of his Stalinist baggage acquired during his membership of the Communist Party.
Higgins was thrown out of the SLL and joined Cliff’s Socialist Review Group (founded in 1950). This group would later turn into the International Socialists, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. Cliff’s Socialist Review came out of a factional struggle within the RCP. Before Cliff left the RCP, he had been a supporter of Max Shachtman’s state-capitalist thesis. [2] Cliff was to build his tendency by recruiting from amongst disaffected RCP members based on their agreement with Cliff’s revisionism of Marxism.
According to a Socialist Equality Party(SEP) perspective document, “Cliff was to argue that the Stalinist dictatorship was only the most finished expression of a new stage in the evolution of world capitalism, which was partially expressed by Labour’s post-war nationalisations and those conducted by the newly independent colonial regimes. He placed the intelligentsia alongside the Stalinist bureaucracy as the midwife of yet another variety of state capitalism. The industrial working class had “played no role whatsoever” in the Chinese revolution, while in Cuba, “middle-class intellectuals filled the whole arena of struggle”. From this, Cliff declared that Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution was wrong because, “While the conservative, cowardly nature of a late-developing bourgeoisie (Trotsky’s first point) is an absolute law, the revolutionary character of the young working-class is neither absolute nor inevitable… Once the constantly revolutionary nature of the working class, the central pillar of Trotsky’s theory, becomes suspect, the whole structure falls to pieces.”[3]
Higgins completely agreed with Cliff’s attack on Trotsky’s work. In an article written in 1963, Higgin’s, agreed with his mentor and leader Cliff, saying, ” The demise of British Trotskyism (and it died sometime before the corpse was formally interred) cannot be blamed only on its tactical inadequacies. However, it is true that with a more realistic appraisal of the world, they could have continued for much longer. But like Trotsky, they founded their attitude on an erroneous analysis of reformism and imperialism with a fundamental misappraisal of Stalinism. The characterisation of Russia as a counter-revolutionary abortion hid the fact of the profoundly capitalist nature of the Russian economy, its dynamism and its ability to survive. Far from being a shallow-rooted caste, the bureaucracy was, and is, an integral part of the Russian body politic”.[4]
When I say “Style is the man”, I do not mean Higgins wore bad clothes, which he did, but this book is not a serious history of the origins of the SWP or the early days of British Trotskyism. What passes for analysis from Higgins would not look out of place in the Beano or Dandy children’s magazines.
Given the seriousness of his subject matter, Higgin’s writes more like a comedian or raconteur than he does a serious historian or political activist. He is, after all, dealing with historical issues in which millions of people lost their lives due to the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Books like these should have a certain amount of gravitas.
To conclude, this book was written 20 years after Higgins had left serious political activity and is written to settle a few old scores rather than contribute to understanding the history of British Trotskyism. You would have thought that his editor at Unkant publishers would have had a word with him. His so-called history is unserious, lacking in any academic rigour and is the work of a “mock historian”. Although talking about another ex Stalinist E.P.Thompson, this quote from Healy is apt for Higgins “Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage. He was equipped within the Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism”. His book is a product of that training.
Endnotes
1. Higgin’s papers are left with Senate House Library, University of London. They are well worth a look because they contain a goldmine of pamphlets etc., about the history of the Fourth International.
2. The Heritage We Defend (30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the history of the Fourth International-The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary Michael Banda’s document “27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.” Contains a detailed and objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P. Cannon, Trotsky’s most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution of the US Socialist Workers Party.The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary.
“Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage. He was equipped within the Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism”. Gerry Healy
“I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. The notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. E. P. Thompson
E.P. Thompson had been dead for two decades and John Saville for 12 years. It is perhaps a little strange that in 2016 a book came out that republished for the first time three copies of the obscure The Reasoner journal that Saville and Thompson established during their split from the British Communist Party in 1956.
The essays in this book by McIlroy and Flewers largely provide Thompson and Saville with a Psuedo left cover for their anti-Marxist positions. This review will show that while breaking organisationally from the Communist Party, Thompson and Saville never broke from many of the ideological positions held during their time in the Communist Party, one of which was their hostility to Trotskyism.
In 1956 sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy turned on its commander in chief and partner in crime, Joseph Stalin. Kruschev’s “secret speech” was hardly secret and was not so much a political break with Stalinism but a mechanism to deal with the raging political and economic crisis that gripped world Stalinism.
Khrushchev’s speech was typical of a man implicated in all the major crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. One subject all the Stalinist bureaucrats agreed on was the correctness of the struggle against Leon Trotsky, the only leading Bolshevik not to have been rehabilitated by the Stalinists. Khrushchev said, “We must affirm that the party fought a serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists and that it disarmed all the enemies of Leninism ideologically. The ideological fight was carried on successfully … Here, Stalin played a positive role.[1]“
Khrushchev had a very limited understanding of the social forces he was inadvertently unleashing with his speech. Far from preventing revolution, he opened the floodgates. His response was the same as Stalin before him: to unleash terror on the working class worldwide.
Trotskyists inside Gerry Heally’s Socialist Labour League welcomed the crisis inside the Soviet Communist Party. Healy sought to clarify the issues involved in the crisis of world Stalinism. However, Pseudo Left groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party muddied the water and argued that despite Khrushchev’s Speech, there was “a process of self-reform” going on under pressure from the working class Stalinism would move in a revolutionary direction.
Thompson got a warm reception from the British SWP, who broke from the Fourth International in the early 1940s. The SWP, from its inception until the present day, has given these emigrants from Stalinism a left cover and justified their reformist and nationalist adaptation and orientation. According to SWP member David Mcnally E P Thompson, “was the greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and had a “political commitment to freeing Marxism from the terrible distortions of Stalinism, a commitment which originated in the battles of 1956 within the official Communist movement.[2] “
It is perhaps an understatement to say that the speech caused mayhem in the British Communist Party. It lost over 9000 members, most of its important intellectuals, and nearly all its historians inside the Communist Party Historians Group. The leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain attempted to deal with the crisis by suppressing any opposition occurring inside the party.
Historians John Saville and EP Thompson were among many who refused to bow down to the party line and issued the three magazines published in this book. Saville and Thompson resigned their party membership, saying, “We believe that the self-imposed restrictions upon controversy, the ‘guiding’ of discussions along approved lines, the actual suppression of sharp criticism – all these have led to a gradual blurring of theoretical clarity, and the encouragement among some communists of attitudes akin to intellectual cynicism when it has been easier to allow this or that false proposition to go by than to embark upon the tedious and frustrating business of engaging with bureaucratic editorial habits and general theoretical inertia” (p137).
While the Reasoner was critical of Stalin and some of his crimes, it said nothing about the persecution and murder of hundreds of thousands of left oppositions, including the state murder of most leading Bolsheviks, including Leon Trotsky. They stayed silent on the Show Trials and purges carried out by the Stalinist bureaucracy.[3]
Perhaps the worst aspect of this book among many is that it continues the lie that Thompson or, for that matter, Saville were Marxists. After leaving the party, Thompson cherry-picked which bits of Marxism he would use while rejecting orthodox Marxism. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a form of “socialist humanism”.
After closing down The Reasoner, Thompson founded the New Reasoner in 1957 along with historian John Saville. The group was made up of ex and current members of the CPGB. It also attracted a varied group of people who had left the Fourth International and members of the Labour Party who wrote articles for the magazine. Most ex Stalinists from the Communist Party dropped out of politics altogether or found an easy life within the Labour Party and trade union apparatus.
Thompson was avowedly hostile to an international revolutionary perspective and sought to imbue his new publication with an “English Marxist” tradition. Thompson rejected orthodox Marxism, and in its place, he preached a form of utopian socialism entitled socialist humanism. To protect his so-called Marxist credentials, he launched “a series of reckless, stage-managed and convoluted polemics against a series of academics, intellectuals who in one form or another had been mistakenly labelled Marxists”. Thompson held the belief that classical Marxism was sectarian. He believed that this “sectarianism” and “purism” dated way before the Russian Revolution.
While Thompson and Saville shared hatred of early classical Marxism, they reserved their most vitriolic hatred for the Trotskyist’s inside the SLL. It must be said that the editors of this book share Thompson’s attitude towards the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Labour League.
The orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth International, which was led in Britain by Gerry Healy of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), saw the crisis within the British Communist party as an opportunity to insist on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. Healy went on an offensive to win the most important cadre from the breakup of the Communist Party. According to Stan Newens,” When the April 1957 Communist Party Congress took place in Hammersmith Town Hall, many of them, including Gerry Healy himself, were outside selling journals and lobbying delegates.”[4] Those figures who had not been entirely corrupted by the years of lies and calumny of the Stalinist regimes throughout the world were won to orthodox or classical Marxism. Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer.
Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to Thompson’s politics but were open to debate. Healy was mindful of the sharp polemics that Thompson had been involved in and told Thompson that “The New left Must Look to the Working Class”[5].
While cordial in tone, Healy did not mince his words when he said, “What strikes one immediately on reading E P Thompson’s article is that he entirely omits the working class; consequently, there is no attempt to analyze the relationship between the left of today and the working class. One would imagine that the New Left had just arrived and existed in a world of its own. The opposite, of course, is the case. The New Left is not just a grouping of people around new ideas that they have developed independently. This new development on the left reflects a particular phase in the elaboration of the crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class movement. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the recent emergence of the new left is the warning of a resurgence of the working class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis which is the basis of such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas.”[6]
During the early years of Thompson’s magazine, the Reasoner and later the New Reasoner, and later still the New Left Review, it is clear that he had no intention of debating with the Trotskyists. Despite Healy trying to secure cordial relations with Thompson and his supporters, it became increasingly clear that Thompson did not see the Trotskyist’s around Healy as a part of the working class. Healy’s response was to say that “Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage, he was equipped within the Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism.” Thompson’s response to the SLL was to accuse it of factionalism. An epithet I might add that has been levelled at the Trotskyist movement throughout its history.
This book is useful to future generations of revolutionaries only because it is an example of how not to build a revolutionary movement. It is important to study the history of the workers’ movement both in Britain and internationally. Students and workers could do no worse than a systematic study of David North’s The Heritage We Defend[7].
Postscript.
In 2014 several capitalist newspapers reported that MI5 had been spying on many members of the British Communist Party starting in the early 1930s. MI5 systematically followed, broke into their house and stole documents of a significant number of academic members of the Communist Party. MI5 even went so far as to plant large numbers of agents inside the Communist Party. One agent, Olga Gray, succeeded in becoming secretary to Harry Pollitt, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[8] How much disruption was caused by these agents is a moot point. Madeline Davis seems to think not much. In her article, Edward Thompson, MI5 and the Reasoner controversy: negotiating “Communist principle” in the crisis of 1956, she downplays MI5 involvement in the aftermath of Kruschev’s speech. My point is why is none of this mentioned in Flewer’s and McIlroy’s book.
[7] The Heritage We Defend (30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International-The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary Michael Banda’s document “27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.”Contains a detailed and objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P. Cannon, Trotsky’s most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution of the US Socialist Workers Party. The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary.
“Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present.”
E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37
“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.”
― Edward Hallett Carr
Facts … are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.
E.H. Carr, What is History?
“every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis.”
Leon Trotsky
You can never judge a history book by its cover. But you can judge a book by the blurb on the back cover, especially when the historians praising the book are broadly conservative ones.
While this new collection of articles contain E.H. Carr’s original title of his world-famous book, I somehow doubt that he would favour the type of gender, racial or culturally-based historiography presented in this book.
The central theme of Carr’s book was how to connect the writing of history with contemporary social, political and economic problems. As the historian, R.G. Collingwood, said: “the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae.”[1]
While the introduction to this new collection of essays is adequate, it leaves out the context and point of Carr’s book, which was to answer an attack on him by the writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[2] As Ann Talbot writes out, “The book was in large measure a reply to Berlin’s essay Historical Inevitability, in which he had criticised those who believed in the “vast impersonal forces” of history rather than giving priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. (Berlin 1997) Berlin maintained that those who regarded history as a determined causal chain, in the manner of Hegel or Marx, denied the role of free will and the individual responsibility of history’s tyrants for the crimes they committed. Both Carr and Berlin wrote with sparkling wit.
What was at issue was Britain’s attitude to the Soviet Union and its place in a putative nuclear war. The counterfactuals that Carr had in mind were those that suggested that some other outcome had been possible in Russia, that the 1917 Revolution was not inevitable, that the Bolsheviks might not have come to power and that instead, the Provisional Government might have succeeded in maintaining its grip on events and managed to establish a parliamentary system. An ideological dispute of this kind is so very un-British that there is not even a satisfactory English word for it, so I will use the German word. What we have here is a very British Historikerstreit.
It was a dispute conducted in the most gentlemanly, oblique and mediated of terms, and both sides were more likely to appeal to the commonsense of the average Times reader than high theory, but a Historikerstreit it was nonetheless. The national peculiarities of the time and class should not lead us to suppose that theoretical questions were not involved any more than we should suppose that political questions were not involved simply because they remained, for the most part, unstated”.[3]This kind of dispute, however gentlemanly, is a very rare occurrence in today’s heavily sanitised academic world.
Despite being called a diverse set of essayists, what these historians write about has a common thread: they reflect a modern-day preoccupation with gender, race, and sexuality. Titles such as “Can and should we queer the past?”, “How can we write the history of empire?” and “Can we recover the lost lives of women?” and a debate over the removal of statues set the tone for the rest of the book.
If the debate over removing a few reactionary statues were all there was, then that would be fine. The middle-class layer behind the removal of revolutionary figures has a far more right-wing and sinister agenda. In some cases, the demand and removal of progressive and revolutionary figures such as Abraham Lincoln are deeply reactionary and troubling.
There is nothing progressive in the destruction of statues and monuments that memorialise the American Revolution and the Civil War leaders such as Lincoln. As Leon Trotsky wrote, “for argument’s sake, let us grant that all previous revolutionary history and, if you please, all history, in general, is nothing but a chain of mistakes. But what to do about present-day reality? What about the colossal army of permanently unemployed, the pauperised farmers, the general decline of economic levels, the approaching war? The sceptical wiseacres promise us that sometime in the future, they will catalogue all the banana peels on which the great revolutionary movements of the past have slipped. But will these gentlemen tell us what to do today, right now”?[4]
As Trotsky said, the study of history is important to make sense of the world. Although Carr was not a Marxist historian, he knew enough about Marx to know that people do not make history as they please. According to Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language”.[5]
The first chapter by Peter Frankopan titled Why global history matters while not breaking any new ground is hard not to disagree with. Alex Von Tunzelmann’s chapter is a little more contentious, examining history at the movies. I am afraid I have to disagree with Katrina Gulliver[6] when she says, “Tunzelmann takes the optimistic view that even inaccurate history might pique people’s interest and lead them to engage with more meaningful sources”.Bad history is what it is and should be opposed in both movies and academia.
It should be said upfront that I love historical movies. It would be hard to find a person that does not. It must also be said that most historical movies are simply misleading, lazy and, in many cases, an outright and deliberate falsification of history. Many historical dramas today are made by a self-obsessed middle-class layer who, instead of wanting to change the social conditions for the bulk of the population, want to change the historical facts to suit their ideological prejudices. The result, in many cases, is dreadful movies that make them a pile of money.
One film mentioned by Tunzelmann is James Cameron’s Titanic. By any stretch of the imagination, this is an extremely bad film. Titanic made close to one billion dollars and was lauded as a great film. As David Walsh wrote, “The response to Titanic is so great and so out of proportion to the quality of the film itself that one is forced to view its success as a social phenomenon worthy of analysis. This is not simply a film—it is virtually a cause. Its admirers defend it with fervour and admit no challenges and no criticisms—it is not simply a ‘good’ film or a ‘wonderful’ film. It must be acknowledged as ‘the greatest film of all time.’[7]
It is hard to know where to start with Justin Bengry’s essay, Can and should we queer the past?. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is either bad history or good history but no queer history. If only Bengry were talking about the study of homosexuality through the ages, this would be a legitimate field of study, but unfortunately, there is an agenda here. The promotion of so-called gender, race and sexuality is being pushed out not by the working class but by a self-obsessed section of the middle class. This is not about social equality or democratic rights. It is about money and power.
This modern-day campaign for want of a better word has nothing to do with left-wing politics and certainly has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the product of decades of ideological and political reaction. It has more to do with the politics of envy than it does with socialism.
Helen Carr’s piece on the history of emotions promotes the “Cultural Turn” genre. Carr’s use of this genre has more in common with writer and historian Stuart Hall than with her great grandfather. As Paul Bond perceptively writes in his obituary of Hall,” Stuart Hall, who died in London February 10 at the age of 82, was the academic figure most closely identified with the growth of Cultural Studies in British universities. His obituaries have been fulsome. Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[8]
Another genre covered in the book is ‘history from below’ –popularised by E. P Thompson and other leading historians in the Communist Party Historians Group. Lucien Febvre originally used the phrase in 1932, ‘Histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut’ roughly translated by Google as ‘history seen from below and not from above. Perhaps the most famous book produced by this genre was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Despite containing some valuable insights, Thompson saw the development of the English working class from a purely nationalist perspective.
He also played down the deeply right-wing nature of the History from Below genre. As Ann Talbot writes, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr”.[9]
When there are many essays in a book, there is usually a conclusion where the editors usually sum up what has been written by all the essayists. For some reason, this has not been done by these editors. Maybe there is confusion over what the hell to do with a rather large number of very conservative pieces of history.
So what is the general reader to make of this book. It is clear that it is a very conservative piece of work and that the essayists were carefully chosen to put forward complacent and largely reactionary historiography. If this is Edward Hallett Carr’s legacy, I am not sure he would be too happy about it. Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great historian “the facts of history never come to us “pure”, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.”
[1] What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 23 [back]
[7] Titanic as a social phenomenon.www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/29/phen-n29.html
[8] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[9] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
Andrew Marvel- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland
“In this way, Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party — his army was to some extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell’s “holy” squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King’s horsemen and won the nickname of “Ironsides.” It is always useful for a revolution to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can learn much from Cromwell.”
“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
-Oliver Cromwell.
“I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.”
-Oliver Cromwell, letter to Sir William Spring, September 1643.
In the first part of his introduction, Ronald Hutton tries to justify why there is a need for a new biography of Oliver Cromwell. He admits the market is a little crowded ( there have been five full-length academic studies alone since 1990), but the historian is on very dodgy ground already if the first words he utters are an apology. On the whole, the book has been well received and heavily reviewed. It is not that surprising because Hutton’s book is largely a very conservative piece of historiography. Also, if the historian Thomas Carlyle were alive today, he would have sent a strongly worded email to the Bristol University Professor Ronald Hutton asking why he had heaped a further dead dog on top of the great leader of the English bourgeois revolution.
The biography has been welcomed by the more conservative-minded writers who have had enough of being kind to Cromwell as Anna Keay writes, “The Making of Oliver Cromwell is radical, powerful and persuasive, and it will cause a stir. It stands as a landmark challenge to the hagiographical tendencies of some of the historiography. Hutton’s assertion that Cromwell is ‘definitely not somebody to be taken simply at his word’ is utterly convincing”.[2]
Cromwell is a bit of a strange choice for a biography, given Hutton’s area of expertise. He is a prolific historian of early modern England’s political, military, cultural, and social history books. He has covered subjects such as the Royalist war effort, high politics, and the social history of witchcraft and paganism.
Hutton’s new book is the first of a three-part biography on one of the most controversial figures in British history. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the only English commoner to become the overall head of state. It must be said from the start that this book is a very conservative piece of historiography. It contains nothing new about Cromwell, and the author has not presented any new archive research. It seems doubtful that Hutton has examined in much detail the new work on Cromwell by the historian John Morrill.[3]
If Cromwell were alive today, it is a safe bet that Hutton would not be on his Christmas card list. His recent hatchet job in the BBC History magazine is testimony to that.[4] Hutton believes that historians have failed to appreciate that Cromwell was “more pragmatic and more devious” than has been shown in the previous historiography and that he was “about 50% saint and about 50% serpent.’
This first volume is primarily a military history. Hutton’s book contains no real or deep insight into the “making of Cromwell”. Hutton admits somewhat grudgingly that Cromwell had a spectacular military career but believes that Cromwell had a large amount of luck on his side and that he took the glory of victory away from his other commanders.
As Hutton is a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, you would have expected him to examine in greater detail the political context of Cromwell leadership of the English bourgeois revolution. However, instead, he concentrates, like all conservative historians, on Cromwell’s early religious experience. From a historiographical standpoint, Hutton borrows heavily from John Adamson, who subscribed to Cromwell being part of a “Junto”. As historian Jared van Duinen points out, “When historians discuss the Long Parliament, they frequently refer to a hazy and often ill-defined collection of individuals invariably centred around the figure of John Pym. This assemblage is variously referred to as ‘Pym’s group’, ‘Pym and his allies’, or ‘Pym and his supporters. Probably the most common appellation has become ‘Pym’s junto’, or more often simply the ‘junto’. Over the years, this junto has assumed a variety of historiographical guises, and its role within the Long Parliament has been the subject of some debate”.[5]
What political analysis Hutton offers he believes that Cromwell’s politics should be seen in the context of a balancing act between the radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and a group of “Independents”, both on the battlefield and within parliament. Hutton offers no political analysis of the class forces involved in this dual power struggle that erupted during the English revolution. The Levellers are not mentioned in his book, and neither does he go into much detail as to the class nature of the so-called “Junto”.
A historian has the right to use any source material he chooses to back up his argument, but Hutton could have done no worse than to consult the writings of a man who knew a little bit about revolutions. As Leon Trotsky points out, “The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. At first, the royal power, resting upon the privileged classes or the upper circles of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted conflict between these two regimes is finally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres – London and Oxford – create their own armies. Here the dual power takes a territorial form, although, as always in civil war, the boundaries are very shifting. Parliament conquers. The King is captured and awaits his fate. It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie.
But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force but as a Praetorian Guard and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’ deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its army the “model army” of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian regime”.[6]
Hutton is correct when he states that the war radicalised Cromwell. But is unable to answer why this is the case, how a simple member of the gentry with no military experience rose to be one of Englands greatest military commanders and leader of the first bourgeois revolution. Hutton did not have to go very far to look for answers but has declined to do so. He makes no mention of the great historian Christopher Hill’s work, Gods Englishmen.[7] Hill sought to place Cromwell in a wider social, political and economic context. Hill was critical of conservative historians like John Morrill and Conrad Russell, who, like Hutton, tend to minimise the revolutionary significance of figures like Cromwell, writing, “People like Morrill and Russell are taking things aboard. Russell said of Cromwell, for instance, that he was the only member of parliament of whom we have records before 1640 who tried to help the lower orders in his work for the fenmen – but he does not draw any conclusions from that, yet this is one of the most important aspects of Cromwell. He had a much broader approach than most of the gentry”.[8]
Hill’s advocation and practice of a materialist conception of history are foreign to Hutton. I doubt he has heard of the great Marxist writer Georgi Plekhanov whose book The Role of the Individual in History should be the first port of call for any historian writing biography. Although the great Russian Marxist G.V Plekhanov was writing about a different period of history and different historical characters, his perceptive understanding of the role great figures play in history could be applied quite easily to Cromwell.
Plekhanov writes, “In the history of the development of human intellect, the success of some individual hinders the success of another individual very much more rarely. But even here, we are not free from the above-mentioned optical illusion. When a given state of society sets certain problems before its intellectual representatives, the attention of prominent minds is concentrated upon them until these problems are solved. As soon as they have succeeded in solving them, their attention is transferred to another object. By solving a problem, a given talent-A diverts the attention of talent B from the problem already solved to another problem. And when we are asked: What would have happened if A had died before he had solved problem X? – we imagine that the thread of development of the human intellect would have been broken. We forget that had A died, B, or C, or D might have tackled the problem, and the thread of intellectual development would have remained intact in spite of A’s premature demise.
Conclusion
It must be said that before I read this book, I had little hope that it would be an objective assessment of the life of Oliver Cromwell. Hutton’s book does not disabuse me of that. It can be only hoped that the next two books contain a degree of insight and analysis missing in the first. I will not hold my breath.
Cromwell was the leader of the bourgeois English Revolution and deserved a better epitaph than this from Hutton. I will leave that to the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky, who wrote, “‘In dispersing parliament after parliament, Cromwell displayed as little reverence towards the fetish of “national” representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nonetheless, it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse upon the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.’
[2] Young Ironsides-The Making of Oliver Cromwell-By Ronald Hutton-https://literaryreview.co.uk/young-ironsides
[3] Why We Need A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-we-need-new-critical-edition-of-all.html
“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles… Everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and child-bearing, toiling from birth till death and still singing. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind.”
George Orwell -1984
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
‘”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”‘
Animal Farm
Bookmarks are the publishing arm of the British Socialist Workers Party (S.W.P.). Their Rebel’s Guide is a series of small books which largely consist of condensed versions of larger books written by the same author.
A Rebel’s Guide to George Orwell by John Newsinger is one of these books. It is largely a smaller version of his book Orwell’s Politics.[1]At only sixty pages long, this is a short introductory guide to the work of the English writer George Orwell. To a certain extent, Newsinger does a good job. By any stretch of the imagination, Orwell is a complex and controversial literary and political figure. He was, without doubt, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century
Orwell is an attractive figure for the S.W.P. They even mistakenly go as far as calling him a literary Trotskyist.[2]A significant amount of material has been written about Orwell by this Pseudo Left political organisation. Yet, for all their so-called insight, they do not characterise Orwell as a centrist political figure.
This is not to denigrate the work of one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, but political categories matter. A simple reading of Leon Trotsky’s writings on centrism would help understand Orwell’s shifting political positions that occurred throughout his life. As Trotsky said, “Speaking formally and descriptively, centrism is composed of all those trends within the proletariat and on its periphery which are distributed between reformism and Marxism, and which most often represent various stages of evolution from reformism to Marxism – and vice-versa. Both Marxism and reformism have a solid social support underlying them. Marxism expresses the historical interests of the proletariat. Reformism speaks for the privileged position of proletarian bureaucracy and aristocracy within the capitalist state. Centrism, as we have known it in the past, did not have and could not have an independent social foundation.
Different layers of the proletariat develop in the revolutionary direction in different ways and at different times. In periods of prolonged industrial uplift or the periods of political ebb tide, after defeats, different layers of the proletariat shift politically from left to right, clashing with other layers who are just beginning to evolve to the left. Different groups are delayed on separate stages of their evolution; they find their temporary leaders and create their programs and organisations. Small wonder then that such a diversity of trends is embraced in the comprehension of “centrism”! Depending upon their origin, their social composition and the direction of their evolution, different groupings may be engaged in the most savage warfare with one another, without losing thereby their character of being a variety of centrism”.[3]
While Trotsky was not writing directly about Orwell, who vacillated between revolution and reformism for most of his life, they capture the essence of Orwell’s politics. But he was also a consistent anti-capitalist and a lifelong opponent of Stalinism. He died a Socialist
There are many striking aspects of Newsinger’s work on Orwell. Perhaps the most obvious is that for a member of an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, he makes no use of Leon Trotsky’s writings on centrism or his important writings on The Spanish Revolution in this small book or bafflingly in his major book Orwell’s politics, making one passing comment that Trotsky had differences with the centrist POUM leader Andreas Nin.
To his credit, Newsinger does show that Orwell read many works by the various radical groups of the time. As Newsinger shows “Orwell saw no shame in starting small. He collected pamphlets from even the smallest groups, and he took them seriously. The 214-page inventory of his 2,700-item collection includes pamphlets by the All-India Congress Socialist Party, the People’s National Party (Jamaica), the Polish Labour Underground Press, the Leninist League, the Groupe Syndical Français, the Workers’ Friend, Freedom Press, Russia Today, the Meerut Trade Union Defence Committee, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, and myriad others”.[4]
He also read Karl Marx and had a substantial collection of left-wing pamphlets borne out by this quote from Newsinger’s book on Orwell” I have before me, what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin but gives high praise to Trotsky and also to Zinoviev.” [5]
Orwell also had a significant number of Leon Trotsky works found in his library after his death. He believed that “Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea.”[6]
As Newsinger states, Orwell read a significant amount of Trotsky’s work enough to be heavily influenced by his work. You could safely say that without Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism, Orwell could not have produced his two most famous works Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell mistakenly called himself a Democratic Socialist, but he was more than that. As he writes, he was heavily influenced and radicalised by the times he lived in “In a peaceful age, I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer… Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.”[7]
As Newsinger points out, Orwell was not always a socialist his early days were spent being a colonial policeman in Burma. Orwell was forced to break from this past imperial life. He did so in response to the 1926 General Strike in Britain. His experiences of poverty and unemployment shaped Orwell’s future writing in the North of England. As Orwell explained, “I have only been down one coal mine so far but hope to go down some more in Yorkshire. It was for me a pretty devastating experience, and it is fearful thought that the labour of crawling as far as the coal face (about a mile in this case but as much as 3 miles in some mines), which was enough to put my legs out of action for four days, is only the beginning and ending of a miner’s day’s work, and his real work comes in between.” [8]
Stalinism’s betrayal of the Spanish revolution had a massive impact on Orwell and led to certain disorientation and confusion, which showed up in his later writings, particularly his work on war and nationalism. His experience of revolutionary Spain would move him further to the left. Homage to Catalonia, written about the events in Spain, is arguably his most important book and the key event in Orwell’s political life.
The English historian Eric Hobsbawm. Suffice to say; this book came under ferocious attack from Stalinists around the world. They still attack it even today. As Ann Talbot writes, “One could be forgiven for thinking, from the venom with which Hobsbawm attacks him, that Ken Loach was personally responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic. And George Orwell, author of Homage to Catalonia, which records his own experiences in the Spanish Civil War, also comes under sustained attack. Victor Gollancz was right to refuse to publish the book Hobsbawm fumes, and Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman was right to run hostile reviews when it was published since it could only divide the left. No one was interested in it anyway. “Only in the cold-war era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure.” With this sneering remark, Hobsbawm implies that Orwell was serving the interests of Washington and the C.I.A. when he tried to expose the crimes of the Moscow bureaucracy in Spain. It is an old lie and one that has been hawked about ever since 1938 when Homage to Catalonia revealed the way in which Stalin suppressed the revolution in Spain”.[9]
This confusion is seen in his essay the Lion and the Unicorn. Orwell writes, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings”. This could be seen as an attack on left-wing intellectuals. It also could read as a little bit of a right-wing attitude as regards patriotism.
Orwell’s essay was not just a knee jerk reaction to the war. As Gregory Claeys points out, “before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell had briefly suggested three of its central themes: first, patriotism was not inherently conservative or reactionary, but might be expressed as a legitimate sentiment among those on the left; second, patriotism alone would not prevent England’s defeat, but instead the social revolution must progress (and here his Spanish ideals were clearly carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that, in fact, it was those who were most patriotic who were least likely to “flinch from revolution when the moment comes.” John Cornford, a Communist, killed while serving in the International Brigades, had been “public school to the core.” This proved, Orwell thought, that one kind of loyalty could transmute itself into another and that it was necessary for the coming struggle to recognise “the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues”.[10]
Orwell’s work after Spain vacillated between right and left positions. Some of his best analyses drew heavily on the works of Leon Trotsky and his British supporters. As this quote shows, his work also contained much political confusion. He writes, “It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting; it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government.
British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure from below, we shall get the government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right through our national life, we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the monied class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own destiny.”[11]
Conclusion
It is hard not to recommend this little book. It is a good basic introduction to the work of George Orwell. A Short Review of this book is not enough to do justice to such an important literary and political figure’s work and legacy, as Orwell undoubtedly was. Towards the end of his life, there was much controversy over the issue of Orwell of compiling a list of some 130 prominent figures in 1949 that he believed were sympathetic to the Stalinist regime in Moscow.
Orwell gave over 35 of these names to a secret government organisation called the Information Research Department. This was an arm of the British Foreign Office set up for organising anti-Soviet and anticommunist propaganda. This fact has been used to rubbish his political and literary legacy.
What Orwell did was wrong and a grave mistake, but his actions should be put in historical context not to justify what he did but to understand and learn from this experience.
As points out, “Orwell, to his credit, was neither a dupe of Stalinism nor a bourgeois liberal defender of the Moscow regime during this period. He took up an intransigent struggle against Stalinism from the left, at a time when this was the most unpopular position to take amongst liberal intellectuals. When Homage to Catalonia was published, Orwell was virtually ostracised for this account of the Spanish Civil War, which laid bare the Stalinists’ treachery against the Spanish and international working class. The Stalinists and their supporters were enraged by the book’s exposure of their role in strangling a genuine revolutionary movement through the same bloody methods then being utilised inside the USSR”. [12]
His work should be studied and critiqued, he was an intransigent opponent of Stalinism and died an opponent of capitalism. It should be in that context that his memory should be honoured.
Reference
George Orwell and the British Foreign Office-Fred Mazelis-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html
A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010-Richard Mynick-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html
Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade Ann Talbot-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/03/hobs-m16.html
“Liberation is a historical and not a mental act. Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically, either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source”.
“From the standpoint of a higher economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men”,
From the start, it must be said that this book is a thoroughly reactionary, pessimistic, anti-Marxist and anti-working class diatribe. A reader would be hard press to find a more right-wing publication this year. It is to Verso’s eternal shame and damnation that it collaborated with its publication.
Despite containing a few left-wing phrases, the word communism is mentioned a few times. But even when they do this, they distort and pervert Marxism. Like in this quote from Marx, What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its grave-diggers taken from The Communist Manifesto, which is correct what follows is a perversion of Marxism they continue (the) “tragedy of the worker, must be her grave-digger as long as she works for capitalism. Capital never extracts energy from the Earth, but it makes a taxing withdrawal from the worker’s body”.
The authors have nothing to do with Marxism. The basic premise of this book is that Mankind is doomed unless it reverts to a pre-capitalist society and that the working class must share some of the blame for the state of the planet because it is a by-product of the development of capitalism.
While the authors of this book would like to think that their political outlook and solution to Mankind’s problems are new, you can trace their political outlook to that of The Frankfurt School. The authors share the same form of subjective idealism that believes in the primacy of thought over matter, the very opposite of Marxism.
As Tom Carter writes, “Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason. Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic thought is inherently authoritarian.[3]
The Tragedy of the Worker’s main critique of Classical Marxism is that it is anthropocentric—that it is only bothered about human needs. The author’s viewpoints are of an ecocentric philosophy that is nature-centred.
As Joel Kovel, long-time editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, writes, “We believe in the intrinsic value of nature, and believe that the highest expression of this is the global reclamation of the commons, which we call ecosocialism”.[4] It must be said that these so-called radical environmentalists have nothing to do with socialism or even Marxism. In many ways, they use these terms much like the Nazi’s did in the 1930s to fool the working class and hide their reactionary agenda.
While the political outlook of this so-called radical environmentalist stems from the Frankfurt School, the authors of this book, for the most part, came out of a bitter split in the British Socialist Workers Party in 2013[5]. Their reactionary perspective that was tolerated and in many ways shared inside the SWP for so long says more about the SWP than it does about the authors of this book.
As Chris Marsden writes, “The dispute has focused almost exclusively upon allegations of rape made against a leading member of the party and the mishandling of the charges by the SWP’s Disputes Committee. The opposition is led by unashamedly referred to as the party’s “celebrity members”, such as Richard Seymour, who runs the blog Lenin’s Tomb, and fantasy writer China Miéville. It draws support from academia and the Socialist Workers Party Students Societies. Their views are posted widely, and internal documents are routinely leaked to hostile publications. Attempts by the SWP leadership to pose as an orthodox opposition to such positions are a transparent fraud. The SWP has incubated the elements involved in the anti-leadership faction and their politics. They draw on positions advocated for years by the party.
The Tragedy of the Worker was reviewed in the SWP’s main theoretical journal, the misnamed International Socialism by Ian Angus.[6] Angus makes mild criticism of the book but offers an olive branch to the authors, saying, “Because of the unfortunate tendency of the left to treat every disagreement as grounds for ostracism, I must stress that this is a disagreement among environmental activists, and I raise it intending to advance our common project, which an open discussion of our differences can only strengthen”.
Angus completely ignores the confused, desperate, and deeply pessimistic approach these authors have to global climate change. Take this quote “In the era of Marx and Engels, and in the long century after, communists dreamed of liberating humanity and enjoying a world of plenty, sharing in abundance. Had October inaugurated a new era of revolutions, had barbarism’s reign ended a century sooner, perhaps that is the world we would have. If Communism – automated or otherwise – was possible at that moment, we hypothesise that now, as we race past tipping point after tipping point, it is no longer – at least not before a long and difficult age of repair. From our benighted vantage point, the birth, growth and exploitation of the working class have been inextricable from biocide and catastrophe. That is to say, global proletarianisation and ecological disaster have been products of the same process. The Earth the wretched would – will – inherit, will be in need of an assiduous programme of restoration. While we may yearn for luxury, what will be necessary first is Salvage Communism”[7].
It is hard to work out where to begin in attacking this reactionary nonsense. This idea that we could “salvage Communism” is hardly original. As David North points out, Michel Pablo made a similar approach in the 1950s. North writes, “The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 provided a degree of political credibility to the conception that the United States was preparing for all-out war against the Soviet Union. Still occupied with a discussion that centred on the process through which the social character of the buffer states had been transformed under Stalinist auspices, Pablo seized upon the possibility of war, converted it into an imminent inevitability, and made it the starting point and centrepiece of a new and bizarre perspective for the realisation of socialism. Adopted at the ninth plenum of the IEC of the Fourth International in 1951, the theory of “war-revolution” argued that the eruption of war between the United States and the Soviet Union would assume the form of a global civil war, in which the Soviet bureaucracy would be compelled to serve as the midwife of social revolutions.
In the schema worked out by Pablo, the international proletariat ceased to play any independent role. Instead, all political initiative in shaping world events was attributed to world imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy. This was spelt out in the document, suggestively entitled “Where Are We Going?” The theoretical essence of his perspective was spelt out as follows: “For our movement, objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements, by and large, constitute objective social reality, for the overwhelming majority of the forces opposing capitalism are right now to be found under the leadership or influence of the Soviet bureaucracy”.[8]
To conclude, this book is deeply reactionary and pessimistic. The authors seem to want to wallow in their disorientation and pessimism, saying, “Salvage has earned its pessimism. There is much to be pessimistic about. Fascist politics have not enjoyed a better climate since 1945. The climate crisis is underway and bringing with it yet further fecund material for a reconstituted far-right. The organisation and militancy of the working-class continue to fray, as does the revolutionary tradition. Hope is still precious; it must still be rationed. Yet, having yearned for our pessimism to be proved wrong and been giddied by Evental shifts which allow for habitable outcomes to be war-gamed, Salvage is tentatively open to a more generous ration of hope. Salvage, recognising that the catastrophe is already upon us and that the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains, is for the Communism of the ruins.[9]
The authors are a collection of disillusioned petty bourgeoisie pseudo lefts who, even if they believed which I doubt that the working class could solve the climate crisis, they do not believe that now. They see the working class as passive and collaborates with capitalism in bringing about Mankind’s destruction. Not a revolutionary class that can fight for a socialist cause that will nationalise giant corporations and banks under workers’ control and abolish capitalism and the nation-state system.
In science, it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds, and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should because scientists are human, and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) — Carl Sagan
August 29, 1662. The council and fellows of the Royal Society went in a body to Whitehall to acknowledge his Majesty’s royal grace to granting our charter and vouchsafing to be himself our founder; then the president gave an eloquent speech, to which his Majesty gave a gracious reply, and we all kissed his hand. Next day, we went in like manner with our address to my Lord Chancellor, who had much prompted our patent.
— John Evelyn
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton 1675
Adrian Tinniswood’s new book is a superb introduction to the origins of the Royal Society. His book part of the Landmark Library series is well written and finely researched. Tinniswood is a historian with no previous track record in science history, so this is a remarkably good book. It is a compact and highly accessible.
The Society resulted from the huge intellectual and political ferment that was created by the English bourgeois revolution. Tinniswood shows that before the Royal Society became a recognised body, it comprised a collection of discussion groups.
Many of these groups were inspired by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon was part of the massive growth of intellectual ideas that proceeded in the seventeenth century. Bacon is an important figure because he was the first to reject traditional Aristotelian thinking and proposed an experimental investigation to find truths about nature. As Karl Marx wrote, “The real progenitor of English materialism is Francis Bacon. Natural science is to him the true science, and sensuous physics the foremost part of science. Anaxagoras with his ‘homoimeries’ and Democritus with his atoms are often his authorities. According to Bacon, the senses arc unerring and the source of all knowledge. Science is experimental and consists in the application of a rational method to sensuous data. Observation, experiment, induction, analysis are the main conditions of a rational method. Of the qualities inherent in matter, the foremost is motion, not only as mechanical and mathematical motion, but more as impulse, vital force, tension, or as Jacob Boehme said, pain of matter. The primitive forms of the latter are living, individualising, inherent, and essential forces, which produce specific variations”.
However, not everyone saw as clear and precise as Bacon according to the Marxist writer David North ” until the seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway”.
Historians have largely accepted that the English bourgeois revolution created the conditions for establishing the Royal Society. Many of the practices adopted by the Society, according to Tinniswood, were “far ahead of its time”. Probably one of the most important activities was the publishing of Philosophical Transactions, launched in 1665. It is the world longest-running scientific journal.
One of the more gruesome facts uncovered by Tinniswood was that live experiments were done on the premises at Gresham College. In 1664, Robert Hooke inserted a pipe into the trachea of a dog and pumped in the air with bellows saying, “I was able to preserve it alive as long as I could desire after I had wholly opened the thorax and cut off all the ribs, and opened the belly,”.
Tinniswood convincingly argues that the Royal Societies methodology, scholarship, and activities laid the foundations for developing modern science. Tinniswood book does not examine the class background of the founders of the Society, but it is clear that many of its founding members were from sections of the lower middle class and gentry class.As Neil Humphrey writes, “The nature of the Society’s membership evolved over the following centuries, but from its beginning, it was a multifarious organisation. Members of the British gentry that used the Society as a means for social advancement (while injecting it with much-needed capital) were plentiful alongside studious researchers. This diversity created a tension between science and privilege that finally exploded in 1830 when fellow Charles Babbage lambasted the glut of unproductive members. In 1847 the Duke of Sussex took the Society’s reins, and scientific fellows seized control and amended its constitution in 1847 to stymie further influence from the gentry. This power-grab forever transformed the nature of the Society from that of a scientific, social club into a scholarly society”.
It is not easy to cover over three centuries of scientific developments in such a short book, but Tinniswood does well. One mild criticism is his lack of interest in what is happening recently in the Royal Society. It would appear that the Society’s recent history is not as glorious as its past. In 2008 the Royal Society’s education director, Professor Michael Reiss, was forced to resign for advocating the teaching of creationism in schools and evolution studies. He said, “Creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.”
His comments provoked anger and opposition from many members. Nobel Prize winners Richard Roberts, John Sulston and Harry Kroto, sent a letter demanding Reiss step down.
Conclusion
Tinniswood’s history of The Royal Society is an accessible account of the formation of modern science. His writing style and explaining complex historical matters in a simple manner means the book is accessible to the general reader without losing its academic rigour. I would highly recommend it.
About the Author: Adrian Tinniswood many books include Behind the Throne and The Long Weekend. He writes for many publications such as The New York Times and BBC History Magazine. He is a senior research fellow in history at the University of Buckingham, and he lives in Bath, England.
“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; O raise us up, return to us again, And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.” William Wordsworth-London, 1802[1]
Let us never forget Milton, the first defender of regicide.[2] -Frederick Engels, The Northern Star December 18, 1847.
“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.” John Milton
“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to”.
Karl Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher to Ruge (1843)
It would be perhaps an understatement to say that the poet John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique position in England’s literary and intellectual history. It could also be argued that Paradise Lost and other great works could place Milton in the realm of one of the world’s greatest narrative poets.
Nicholas McDowell’s new book provides the reader with a competent introduction to the life of John Milton. While I do not normally pay too much attention to the title of a book, it is worth mentioning on this occasion. While Mcdowell concedes that Milton was a “poet of Revolution”, he does not say that Milton was the poet of the English bourgeois revolution. McDowell deliberately downplays Milton’s radicalism and his theoretical connection to groups like the Levellers, Diggers and other radical groups that appeared during the English bourgeois revolution.
A second significant omission from Mcdowell’s book is his failure to show Milton’s significant contemporary importance. The Poet Christopher Kempf recently issued a collection of Poems entitled What Though The Field Be Lost.[3] Kempf is a huge fan of Milton. According to Erik Schreiber, “The book takes its title from a line in Poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which describes Satan’s rebellion against God, his defeat and his temptation of Adam and Eve. Critics have likened the angels’ uprising to a civil war, and Milton’s initial attempt to write the epic was indeed interrupted by the English Civil War. It is legitimate that Kempf turned to Milton after being inspired to focus on the American Civil War”.[4]
Kempf, to his eternal credit, quotes for an ordinary soldier who, even during the most bloody conflict in American history, had the outstanding ability to compare his struggle with that of Milton’s, writing, “An eagle in the very midst of the thunderstorm might have experienced such confusion. Milton’s account of the great battle between the forces of good and evil, which originated in this same question of secession, gives some faint idea of this artillery duel.”[5]– The biggest weakness of McDowell’s book is its deliberate failure to draw any connection Milton had to radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers. His oversight is perhaps driven more by ideological considerations than an unintended omission on McDowell’s part. One such omission is Mcdowell’s non-use of David William’s, Milton’s Leveller God.
According to John Rees, Williams has “done a considerable service in bringing out this interpretation of Paradise Lost as an account of self-determining democratic revolution. It is a powerful and closely argued reading that will repay careful consideration by all those who wish to understand Milton’s purpose. But there are more difficulties in seeing this as a direct reflection of specifically Leveller politics. First, there are some circumstantial difficulties. Things said in the revolutionary 1640s do not have the same meaning when said in the late 1660s. And they are not the same said in poetry rather than pamphlet prose. A revolutionary program advanced in the heat of debate and a poetic reflection two decades later may be related, but not in simple or straightforward ways. Second, and more importantly, in concentrating on the Leveller strand of thought informing Milton’s politics, Williams excludes other threads in a more varied tapestry. There are, to be sure, continuities between Milton and the Levellers, but there are also important differences. Williams has certainly done us all a service in highlighting the former, but the latter need some consideration as well.[6]
Milton was a genius for all to see, but his Dissent and radicalism did not fall from the sky. He was part of the intellectual flowering of Dissent, a complex religious and intellectual development shared by other radical elements of the English Civil War, such as the Levellers, who wanted greater equality although not for everyone in society. Milton and the other radical groups were also part of the merchant and manufacturing classes in their struggle against the aristocracy. Milton put this struggle by the merchant and manufacturing classes into a literary form and was joined by other major figures like John Bunyan’s and his world-famous Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). According to Paul Mitchell, Bunyan’s use of imagery” reflected deep objective changes in society that also expressed the subjective strivings for a better future”. Milton’s defence of the English Revolution and his agreement with the execution of Charles I meant his work would go on to influence a whole number of French and American revolutionaries. Milton’s work was also followed by major figures in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The people’s commissar for the Enlightenment, Anatole Lunarcharsky, compared the Russian Revolution to Milton’s.
Milton is also an attractive figure for revolutionaries of today. His revolutionary fervour, unfailing attachment to the ‘good old cause’, commitment to human freedom, and hatred of all forms of tyranny are good examples for all revolutionaries to follow. But you would not get that from McDowell’s book.McDowell’s book is not without merit. It is a groundbreaking work in many ways and contains recent archival discoveries that, on a limited basis, further our understanding of the connection between Milton and the revolution he fought for. Mcdowell, unfortunately, is not a radical. His biography is very conservative and challenges biographers such as the Marxist Christopher Hill[7] , who, unlike Mcdowell, believed Milton was radical at a very early age and became more radical during the English revolution. Also, unlike McDowell, Hill believed that Milton’s prose was heavily influenced by the English bourgeois revolution and groups such as the Levellers and Diggers. McDowell mentions the Levellers only twice in the book. McDowell believes that Milton was a great history man but does not subscribe to any materialist or Marxist view of such men. Although the great Russian Marxist G.V Plekhanov was writing about a different period of history and different historical characters, his perceptive understanding of the role great figures play in history could be applied quite easily to Milton.
Plekhanov writes, “In the history of the development of human intellect, the success of some individual hinders the success of another individual very much more rarely. But even here, we are not free from the above-mentioned optical illusion. When a given state of society sets certain problems before its intellectual representatives, the attention of prominent minds is concentrated upon them until these problems are solved. As soon as they have succeeded in solving them, their attention is transferred to another object. By solving a problem, a given talent-A diverts the attention of talent B from the problem already solved to another problem. And when we are asked: What would have happened if A had died before he had solved problem X? – we imagine that the thread of development of the human intellect would have been broken. We forget that had A died, B, or C, or D might have tackled the problem, and the thread of intellectual development would have remained intact in spite of A’s premature demise.
In order that a man who possesses a particular kind of talent may, by means of it, greatly influence the course of events, two conditions are needed. First, this talent must make him more conformable to the social needs of the given epoch than anyone else: if Napoleon had possessed the musical gifts of Beethoven instead of his own military genius, he would not, of course, have become an emperor. Second, the existing social order must not bar the road to the person possessing the talent which is needed and useful precisely at the given time. This very Napoleon would have died as the barely known General, or Colonel, Bonaparte, had the old order in France existed another seventy-five years. [8]
As was said earlier, Mcdowell does not subscribe to a materialist view of historical development. The last person to place Milton within the context of the great English bourgeois revolution was the Marxist Christopher Hill. Even with a cursory look at his biography of Milton,[9] it is easy to see that it contains more insight and gives the reader a far more multifaceted view of the poet than any other biography of Milton, including McDowell’s. It could be argued that this was Hill’s greatest book.
Hill correctly places Milton alongside other “Bourgois radicals” of the English Revolution. While Milton was influenced by ancient writers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Homer, Hill, believed Milton’s connection with radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and others had a far more profound impact on his thinking and actions than has been given credit.
As this quote shows, Hill did not think Milton was a Leveller but said, “Lest I be misunderstood, I repeat that I do not think Milton was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behemist. Rather I suggest that we should see him living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views which he could not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted him. (Milton and the English Revolution [1977], 113-14)
As Andrew Milner perceptively writes, “By the standards of previous Milton criticism, Hill’s Milton is boldly adventurous. It restores the poet to that social context from which he has been wrenched by the ahistorical idealism of mainstream literary criticism. Its emphasis on the radicalism both of that context and of the poet himself serves as a valuable corrective to those who have sought to subsume Milton under the mantle of conservative orthodoxy. Milton the dour Puritan is superseded by Milton, the libertarian revolutionary, and much that has previously appeared obscure becomes clarified”.[10]
McDowell’s Poet of Revolution is not a bad book and contains much that is worthwhile. However, it does not give the reader any great new insight into the English bourgeois revolution or Milton’ place within that revolution. Milton was a major player in that revolution. Marxists like Hill saw the English Revolution of 1640-1660 as a bourgeois revolution. Hill also believed that paved the way for the future development of capitalism. Figures like Milton and Oliver Cromwell were bourgeois revolutionaries who were convinced that they had divine support for their revolution. But they were not alone. Other radicals formed the left wing of this revolution. It was these groups that had an important impact on Milton’s thinking as a poet and revolutionary. The next biography of Milton needs to explore this connection in greater depth.
‘Cromwell was about 50% saint and about 50% serpent.’
Ronald Hutton,
Cromwell’s task consisted of inflicting as shattering a blow as possible upon the absolutist monarchy, the court nobility and the semi-Catholic Church, which had been adjusted to the needs of the monarchy and the nobility. For such a blow, Cromwell, the true representative of the new class, needed the forces and passions of the masses of people.’
Leon Trotsky
‘In dispersing parliament after parliament, Cromwell displayed as little reverence towards the fetish of “national” representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nonetheless, it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse upon the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.’
Leon Trotsky
If the historian Thomas Carlyle were alive today, he would have sent a strongly worded email to the Bristol University Professor Ronald Hutton asking why he had heaped a further dead dog on top of the great leader of the English bourgeois revolution Oliver Cromwell.
In a recent BBC History magazine article called The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell, Hutton claims that “The victor of the Civil Wars described himself as pious, honest and selfless. But, as all too many victims of his lies and malice would have attested, the reality was often more sinister”.[1]
The purpose of his BBC article was not to make an objective assessment of Cromwell but has more to do with the fact that Hutton has a book on Cromwell coming out in August.[2]
The last few decades have seen a veritable production line of studies examining every facet of the main leader of the English bourgeois revolution. In the past three decades alone, he has been the subject of five full-length biographies, three studies of his career as a soldier, and a further three major collections of essays.
Hutton is a capable historian, so why would he adopt the attitude of a Sun Newspaper journalist when assessing Cromwell. One reason is that he can get away with it. It is a rare event today when a historian challenges the work of a fellow historian. History has become far too polite. Long gone are the great debates of the past. Today’s historians are far too comfortable and passive.
Hutton’s essay has all the hallmarks of a provocation which he knows will go unanswered. A second reason and Hutton is correct to say that so little is known about Cromwell that it is easy to make outlandish comments on his character without too much come back.
Hutton’s new book on Cromwell does not appear until August of this year, but it is clear from his previous work on Cromwell that he is unlikely to produce an objective biography of Cromwell based on the previous historiography. Hutton rejects the notion that Cromwell can be best understood from this objective standpoint.
While it is hoped that Hutton’s new book does place Cromwell within the complex events that are known as the English Revolution, given that his BBC History Magazine does not, I will not hold my breath.
Hutton knows he cannot just trash the memory of Cromwell. In his essay, he pays lip service to Cromwell’s many attributes but adds, “all this is quite familiar to scholars of the period, but my research also revealed less attractive – and less often noticed – aspects of Cromwell’s personality. One is his relentless pursuit of self-promotion. He grabbed the attention of the Long Parliament, almost as soon as it was elected, by speaking on behalf of the famous radical Puritan John Lilburne, who had been imprisoned by the royal government. Cromwell had never met the man, but that did not prevent him from using his misfortune as an opportunity to further his career”.[3]
The rest of Hutton’s article continues trashing Cromwell’s reputation. He rehashes previous vitriolic attacks on Cromwell, saying that “Cromwell prepared his soldiers to inflict violence and retribution before the assault by quoting a biblical text which called for the cleansing of the land of idolators, declaring of Catholic images that “they that make them are like unto them” and so should be destroyed with them. His notorious massacre at the Irish town of Drogheda, later in his career, was long presaged”.
Buzzing Of The Bees
Despite it going out of fashion, I still find it important to establish what the great English historian E. H Carr said was going on inside a historians head. What if any bees are buzzing around Hutton’s head?
The first thing that strikes you about Hutton’s work is his underestimation of the damage revisionist historians have done in their Marxist and Whig historiography attacks. In his book Debates in Stuart History, according to Mark Stoyle, “Hutton argues that the ‘revisionist’ wave of the late 1970 s was the product of specific developments within the culture of academic life over the previous fifteen years: citing, in particular, the expansion of higher education, which prompted a novel disposition among academics ‘to establish new work by questioning received views’; the sudden availability of fresh sources; and ‘the general distrust of established values which developed during the 1960s.”
Stoyle says that “Hutton’s argument that revisionism was not so much a specifically right-wing attack on the left, as is sometimes claimed, but was rather a rebellion by young historians of widely differing political views against those senior academics — almost all from comfortable backgrounds, but of far-left inclinations — who represented the historical establishment. The fact that the young Turks — mostly political liberals, who ‘included no Marxists or radical socialists’ — were so quickly labelled as ‘revisionists’ by their opponents was indicative of how some senior left-wing academics saw the battle, for, as Hutton notes, the term ‘revisionist’ had ‘commonly been employed during the … 1970 s by Marxists across the world to describe those who adulterated and betrayed true doctrine’.
What the revisionists eventually succeeded in doing was to demolish the ‘socialist modernisation of the Victorian historiographical achievement’ which had been crafted by historians such as Christopher Hill over the previous 30 years. But, partly because of their differences in emphasis, partly because of the sheer complexity of the picture which they had uncovered, the revisionists failed to establish a new consensus of their own”.[4]
It is no accident that Stoyles praises Hutton’s latest book as both seem to adopt a lot of the right-wing wing revisionists hostility to Marxist historiography. While Hutton does note somewhat perceptively that those right-wing revisionist historians who sought to demolish Marxist historiography had nothing but hot air in which to replace it. Hutton’s complacent attitude towards these historians further legitimises their anti-Marxism.
To conclude, I will review Hutton’s new book at a later date. Those who want a more objective assessment of Oliver |Cromwell would do well to examine t the work of the great Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who said of Cromwell,” In this way, Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party — his army was to some extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell’s “holy” squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King’s horsemen and won the nickname of “Ironsides.” It is always useful for a revolution to have iron sides. On this score British workers can learn much from Cromwell. The observations on the Puritans’ army made by the historian Macaulay are here not without interest”.[5]
[1] BBC History Magazine-8 Jul 2021-Ronald Hutton.
[3] BBC History Magazine-8 Jul 2021-Ronald Hutton.
[4] Debates in Stuart History by Ronald Hutton-Review by: Mark Stoyle-The English Historical Review-Vol. 121, No. 491 (Apr., 2006), pp. 540-542 (3 pages)
“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights”—Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, 1888
“I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd questions and in a hurry to grow up”. Mieko Kawakami
“‘Progress’ is a modern idea, which is to say it is a false idea.”—Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, 1888
Mieko Kawakami latest novel, excellently translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is a brutal examination of adolescence in Japanese society. The book is drawn from her childhood in Osaka, Japan. By all accounts, it was a pretty bad experience. Her father was never home. Forced into being the main breadwinner at a tender age to support her family gave her the ability to write this “novel of ideas” “. As Kawakami says, “I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd questions and in a hurry to grow up”.
Kawakami started to write at a very early age. She explains that “I try to write from the child’s perspective—how they see the world. Coming to the realisation you are alive is such a shock. One day, we are thrown into life without warning.”
In an interview with The Japan Times, Kawakami says, “I wanted to create a story that examines how religion, ethics and friendship influence human relationships,” she says. “Do we live our lives under the guidance of something bigger, like spiritual or ethical beliefs, or do we live as individuals?”.[1]
As Elaine Margolin perceptively writes, “Kawakami is captivated by that precious time of life when one is on the cusp of adulthood but still really a child. The author’s ability to mimic the rhythmic disturbances of a teenage mind is mesmerising; she is a master of the interior voice. She instinctively grasps how one can feel silly and light one moment and be in the throes of anguish the next. In one of her earlier novels, Ms Ice Sandwich, she describes a lonely boy whose family is in disarray, finding solace by visiting a supermarket worker each day who kindly gives him an egg sandwich”.[2]
The book’s theme of childhood bullying is a universal one. ” Kawakami explains that the nature of bullying has changed. “In the old days, there were just two places for relationships — home or school — but now, with social media, there is nowhere to hide, and the pressure is constant. Victims of bullying think the whole world knows they are being bullied. It is even crueller today with the way it can be spread.”
I still remember my childhood bully. His name was Desmond Kavanagh. His reign of terror did not last too long. Unlike Kawamaki’s character, who does not fight back, one person in my school had enough of Kavanagh’s bullying and kicked the crap out of him. The bizarre thing is that Kavanagh tried to befriend me on Friends Reunited a few years later.
Novel of Ideas
Heaven has been described as a novel about ideas. Writing a “novel of Ideas” is a complicated business. Kawakami draws heavily on the work of philosophers like Frederich Nietzsche and Kant. A blog that she started to promote her singing career, “Critique of Pure Sadness,” displayed an unhealthy fascination with Kant. Her latest book leans heavily on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is a very unfortunate choice, especially for such a young writer. Nietzsche’s hostility towards the working class and socialism and his disdain for objective truth made him a favourite writer of the Nazi movement.
As Stefan Steinberg states, “Apologists for Nietzsche seek to distance him from the policy and activities of the Nazis. But is Nietzsche’s position here so remote from Adolph Hitler’s entreaty, in an internal NSDAP memo of 1922, for the: “most uncompromising and brutal determination to destroy and liquidate Marxism”? Adolph Hitler was certainly no philosopher, just as Nietzsche was not merely a political ideologue. But who can reasonably doubt that the former had little difficulty in seamlessly incorporating the latter’s thoroughly backwards-looking programme of biological racism, hatred of socialism and the concept of social equality—together with his advocacy of militarism and war—into the eclectic baggage of ideas which constituted the programme of National Socialism”?.[3]
The strength of the novel is Kawakami’s examination of ideas as a way of writing a novel. As Merve Emre writes, “dreamlike expression of their fledgling ideas has an artistic value that flies in the face of critics like Northrop Frye, who believed that an “interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.” But “Heaven” also models a rigorous and elegant process of inquiry that can transcend its pared-down fictional world. It agitates against the enduring idea that the best novels concern themselves with the singular minds and manners of people, offering no resources for the political and moral demands of “real life.” The narrator’s persecutor Ninomiya energetically parrots this argument”.[4]
Kawakami, ability to write from a child’s perspective is astonishing at times and avoids what one writer says are “puffed-up platitudes about the inherent cruelty and sympathy of children”.
If I am generous, I would say that Kawakami also avoids Nietzsche’s social and political pessimism and presents the world of children accurately. One major criticism is that, unlike many great Japanese writers, such as Yukio Mishima and Kazuo Ishiguro, she does not place her characters in this book in a social or political context. The reader would not know that while “Heaven” takes place in Japan, bullying is rife in Japanese society so much that classroom harassment forced a government to bring in national legislation because of a growing number of student suicides.
To conclude, Kawakami’s work is well worth reading. Her fiction deals with the problems of everyday life for working-class people in Japan. That is one of the reasons behind her popularity. She examines critical social issues that permeate Japanese society. These include broken families, absent fathers and children struggling to find themselves in a increasingly cruel world. It is hoped that she does not spend too much time absorbing Nietzsche’s works and instead let herself be influenced by some more healthy writers such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. She has a bright future, and I look forward to her next novel.
About the Author
Mieko Kawakami is the author of the novel Breasts and Eggs, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020. She was born in Osaka. Kawakami made her writing debut as a poet in 2006 and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Her writing is deeply imbued with poetic qualities. Her work concentrates on the plight of women in Japanese society. Her works have been translated into many languages and are available all over the world. She has received numerous prestigious literary awards in Japan for her work, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize.
Review: Alone in Berlin-Hans Fallada. Translated by Michael Hoffman. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009. RRP £9.99 paperback.
“As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that does not mean that we are alone. It doesn’t matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not,” ”
Otto Quangel
“He who thinks of renouncing “physical” struggle must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without the flesh.”
― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
Hans Fallada’s excellent novel is set in Berlin of the 1940s. Despite being a fictional account of a German family, the book is based on the life of Otto and Elise Hampel. Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen, was born in 1893 in Greifswald, Germany.
To say he had a strange life would be an understatement. At the tender age of 18,he killed a friend in a duel and, according to James Buchan, spent “much of his career in psychiatric hospitals and drying-out clinics or in prison for thieving and embezzlement to support his morphine habit. In between, he worked on the land, wrote a couple of novels and held down jobs for a period on newspapers. Then, in 1944, he shot at his wife in a quarrel and was confined again to a psychiatric hospital.”[1]
After this shocking episode in 1947, Aufbau-Verlag Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein (“Each dies only for himself”) was published in Berlin. In many ways, this was a groundbreaking working work in that it was one of the first accounts of resistance to Nazi rule. Unfortunately, tragically Fallada died of a heart attack that same year.
The new English translation of Fallada’s novel joins a growing number of recent books that have shown that there was a small but significant opposition to the Nazi regime. Fallada’s book counters the lie that there was no opposition to Hitler and that all Germans supported the regime. As Bernd Reinhardt correctly points out, “Fallada’s nuanced picture of daily life in the Third Reich shows the falsity of the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen and his supporters, holding that all Germans uniformly supported Hitler and the extermination of the Jews. The latest remake of Alone in Berlin (directed by Swiss actor Vincent Pérez) also rejects a collective guilt thesis. “I wanted to present this omnipresent fear. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife”, the director said”.[2]
Fallada’s book has sold extremely well for a book written over half a century ago. The book’s basic premise is that it follows the life of the Quangel family, who placed tiny handwritten postcards on stairs and hallways. Mr and Mrs Quangel distributed more than 200 such protest postcards in Berlin in 1940 following the death of their son at the front. This was done at a huge risk to them and their family. Anyone caught with the postcards would be executed. It is doubtful whether the English writer George Orwell knew of this book, but there are similarities between it and 1984. According to Wikipedia, “Three months after its 2009 English release, it became a “surprise bestseller” in both the US and UK. It was listed on the official UK Top 50 for all UK publishers, a rare occurrence for such an old book. Hans Fallada’s 80-year-old son, Ulrich Ditzen, a retired lawyer, told The Observer he was overwhelmed by the latest sales, “It is a phenomenon.” Primo Levi said it is “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”[3]
It has now been translated into 30 languages. One reason for the book’s success is the fact that the issues it addresses are contemporary ones. The struggle for social equality is very much a modern-day concern. With social inequality at its highest since the 1920s, many people are looking for answers to combat capitalism.
This English translation of the book appeared at the height of the new movement of far-right groups such as the National Front in France and Pegida and Alternative for Germany. State violence increasingly dominates everyday life. People need to know the history of the Quangels and other struggles against the Nazi’s.To conclude, while this an important book Fallada had no real perspective to counter fascism in Germany. He was no Marxist, and it is unclear whether he ever read Leon Trotsky on Germany because if he had, he would have probably produced a different book. As Trotsky said, “Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat, the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless”.[4]
Review: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Annette Dumbach & Judd Newborn-One World publisher-ISBN-10: 1786072505.£9.99
“we will not be silent. We are your bad conscience” White Rose Leaflet
“Even the most dull-witted German has had his eyes opened by the terrible bloodbath, which, in the name of the freedom and honour of the German nation, they have unleashed upon Europe and unleash a new each day. The German name will remain forever tarnished unless finally the German youth stands up, pursues both revenge and atonement, smites our tormentors, and founds a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German people look to us! The responsibility is ours: just as the power of the spirit broke the Napoleonic terror in 1813, so too will it break the terror of the National Socialists in 1943.”
White Rose Pamphlet
“To say to the Social Democratic workers: “Cast your leaders aside and join our ‘non-party united front” means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But the reality today is the struggle against fascism. … The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped”.
Leon Trotsky-For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism (December 1931)
This book provides the reader with a very thorough and accessible introduction to the life of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement. The struggle of the Scholl family belies the common myth that there was no opposition to the Nazi’s during the Second World War.
The book fails to address the reason why this opposition was so small and disparate. The fact that Hitler was able to rise to power and smash the worker’s movement and the most progressive sections of the middle class was due to the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy who allowed him to come to power without a shot being fired. This history was to shape the character of the opposition to Hitler. After all, the White Rose movement was a non-violent resistance group comprised of five middle-class students at Munich University. At its heart, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, their fellow students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and their professor Kurt Huber.
Despite knowing full well that if caught, they faced instant death, they began distributing leaflets and graffiti. They were caught in 1943 by the Gestapo and, after a brief trial, executed. Sophie Magdalena Scholl was just 21 at the time of her state murder.
It is clear from the history of Scholl and the White Rose movement that it did not have a fully worked-out political agenda that drove its activities, and some of its activities against the fascist regime were dominated by their religious leanings. Scholl was heavily influenced by the theologian Augustine of Hippo. She described that her “soul was hungry”. Not everything was guided by their religious beliefs. As this statement from a White rose Pamphlet states, “Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we do not need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?”[1]They had substantial political opposition to the Nazi dictatorship.
As Tanja B. Spitzer writes, “The White Rose was a small endeavour with large consequences. Together they published and distributed six pamphlets, first typed on a typewriter, then multiplied via mimeograph. At first, they only distributed them via mail, sending them to professors, booksellers, authors, friends and others—going through phone books for addresses and hand-writing each envelope. In the end, they distributed thousands, reaching households all over Germany. Acquiring such large amounts of paper, envelopes, and stamps at a time of strict rationing without raising suspicion was problematic, but the students managed by engaging a wide-ranging network of supporters in cities and towns as far north as Hamburg and as far south as Vienna. These networks were also activated to distribute the pamphlets, attempting to trick the Gestapo into believing the White Rose had locations all across the country”.[2]
They did provide a clear tactic to anyone who wanted to oppose the fascists saying “in their fifth pamphlet. “And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present ‘state’ in the most effective way….We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine….Try to convince all your acquaintances. Of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!” While it was very difficult for the group to act amid war and being hounded by the Nazi’s secret police, a major weakness of the group is that it did not appeal to the one class that could bring down the hated Nazi dictatorship, and that was the German and international working class. The defeat of the German revolution because of the betrayal of Stalinism and Social Democracy had meant the class consciousness working class in Germany had been thrown back for decades. It is doubtful that any of the White Rose movement had read any of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky works, which is a shame because even a cursory read of his work would have given the group an entirely different political outlook. As Trotsky writes “When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism. This was precisely the situation facing the White Rose group.
To conclude, this 75th-anniversary edition deserves a wide readership. The story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement contains an important lesson for the international working class and will inspire anyone who has a burning hatred of fascism and all forms of racism. As Sophie Scholl said, “I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best I could do for my nation. I, therefore, do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.”
A Trumpet of Sedition 