Theoretical Clarity and Revolutionary Change: The Arab Spring in Fiction

Alaa Al-Aswany’s fictional engagement with the events known as the Arab Spring may easily seem pointless, cliché or commonsensical given the tons of films, novels and studies on the topic. But it is exactly what the title underscores for English reading audiences in his recently translated novel, The Republic of False Truths (2021) that raises his work above the waters of cliché and commonsensicality. Unlike its Arabic title which connotes the farcical element in the quasi-republic, the English title zooms on the false omnipresent that applies uninterruptedly on everyone in that republic, irrespective of class or gender. Known internationally for The Yacoubian Building (2002), the recent addition explains (and never justifies) the existential need to grapple with precisely that which most people uphold as unmistakably self-evident. Indeed, when presumably unbiased research articles, speak less of private blogs or contents in either heavy or social media outlets, find the social uprisings that led to the decapitation of the likes of Mubarak “decisively deprived of traditional narratives and are haunted by the theme of death…”^[1], then the self-evident is no longer that self-evident. More often than not, resorting to abstractions—as with this presumably research piece—is triggered by this author less for exploring the essence of the experience and more to evaporate that experience from the radar of the social field. Indeed, this academic facilitates the expulsion of reality from history by borrowing from a preexisting pool of vocabulary and set of thinking structures that masturbates endlessly on death, the limits of narrative’s agency or the Kantian sublime.  

In this connection, Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths serves in reversing similar masturbations and lies. Lest they fall to collective amnesia, the novel recreates the events leading to the euphoria of Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2012, the decapitation of the dictatorship’s head and a few swirling events afterward. In answer to anyone doubting the relevance from synthesizing those events in a story, just ask that person: where is Tahrir Square today in the map of Cario? Of all seventy-three chapters comprising the novel, chapter thirty-one explicitly answers: “Tahrir Square has been transformed into a small independent republic—the first parcel of Egyptian land to be liberated from the dictator’s rule.” (184) Little wonder then how now it has become an interminable construction site with the specific objective of eradicating from collective memory the very possibility of massive gathering which may or may not propagate into a revolt. If a physical space has garnered such a monumental level of hatred and revenge, then unbiased rationalizations of historical reality, let alone activists’ narratives of the popular uprising, remains an unaffordable indulgence. Not for nothing, the early twentieth century French philosopher/ activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) finds: “Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own words…”^[2] For if events that unfolded in most readers’ own life time, that is, only the other day, are decreed disconcerting and are now being falsified, there is more reason to distrust official reporting of incidents that happened where we were less aware or not on this planet yet. It is never a tautology to underscore that history writing is thus no joke.

Indeed, Al-Aswany’s novel does not shy from the task of setting things, events and people in their correct historical order. It measures these actors as variables in the scale of the experienced unfolding, not mythical or ideological unraveling. There will be people who may find that measurement missing in the scale of revolutionary ardor and passion, but what can be more radical and subversive than an honest elucidation of that which actually happened and happens. Understandably, there exists vested interests to report on that which took place in Tahrir from bourgeois’ perspective, and to justify the counterrevolutionary status quo of the present. Hence, the explanatory (never the justificatory) demand for a methodological axis serving also an existential matrix whereby falsity (false truths in the title) can be distinguished from truth. Al Aswany’s theoretical coordinates have been history’s inevitable ‘class struggle’.

The term ‘class struggle’ comes from a glossary that for better or for worse has been antinomic vi-à-vis the current counterrevolutionary climate of post 2011 Arab World. Let us recall that several Arab cities and capitals witnessed exhilarating agitations and marches in millions against dictators only to be disappointed in the following months and years. The term ‘class struggle’ is not just an ideological milestone for those activists of social movements on the left; it is a methodological eye-opener for registering and thus seizing the real movement of the world, according to the nineteenth century German philosopher Karl Marx^[3]. The concept expresses a historical continuity with uprisings and revolutions of the oppressed from all over the world and from times both past and to come, and if enough oppressed people embrace the class struggle as a milestone for consciousness, the current world order will be not just shaken but redefined. Hence why the powers that be have always had a vested interest in sweeping the term ‘class struggle’, speak less of the concept, under the rug.

Through mostly written entries and dynamic interactions between a set of characters and via reading mostly their entries: Ashraf Wissa, General Alwany, Seikh Shamil, Asma Zanaty, Mazen Saqqa, Madam Nourhan and Essam Shaalan along with others readers will gain a solid understanding of what took place in Tahrir. Each character emerges from diametrically opposing backgrounds, and the novel reflects the class dimension of the uprising. Only when considered from the point of view of the class struggle, readers unveil how the counterrevolution justifies the present status quo in effusive abstractions and unabashed crusades for chasing smokescreens: death and the presumed wisdom of/in extinction!

Given this connection, The Republic of False Truths (2021) resuscitates the concept of the ‘class-struggle’ for purposes of underlying needed, if not urgent, theoretical clarity. Part of Al-Aswany’s demystification showcases that well before the restoration (July 2013) formally triumphed, most rank-and-file Egyptians expressed varying levels of exasperations at revolutionaries. Perhaps, apart from the heady eighteen days leading to the abdication of President Mubarak and which were marked by a euphoria and spectacle, the following weeks and months witnessed a steady decline in the supply of people living in impoverished and destitute neighborhoods since most of these people become disenchanted from the revolutionary project. Ironically, those people beset by black misery themselves turned hostile of the very process that promises the breaking of their chains. Counting as the evidence for this state of affairs is how the oppressed accuse the revolutionary youth of jeopardizing their security by conspiring against the country.

When Ashraf Wissa and his team display the atrocities of the military through a moving cinema project across impoverished Cairo neighborhoods, he and his tiny group of activists were attacked, their gadgets broken and themselves are accused of bringing disaster. Instead of despair, Al-Aswany’s unorthodox conclusion zooms on a needful theoretical clarity, the one that attributes the failure of the revolution less to coercion by the repressive forces and more to the oppressed own conservatism, nihilistic resignation and detachment from revolutionary agitation. In the interest of fairness, Al-Aswany shows that the military intervened only when the majority were fed up; repression came to formalize what the oppressed themselves desired to restore: security. Without a precise reading regarding the role of various actors, revolutionaries will remain befogged with myths and self-pity. Even if repression has been behind the resignation of the oppressed, and not the other way around, a legalistic and procedural response will be still inconsequential. By pushing for an unsubstantiated narrative (confusing cause with effect), Al-Aswany unveils the plans of counterrevolution. Once activists’ attention is sidetracked toward the legalistic, as when denouncing human rights abuses, the revolutionaries pronounced their own death sentence. No one else did.

Still, mounting criticism in regard to the ways in which the revolutionaries responded does not mean that Al-Aswany favors the culturalist approach, whereby the oppressed are blamed for their own misery. The Republic of False Truths hinges its revolutionary project on a deeply entrenched historicist approach. The narrative has been careful with its vocabulary and plot details lest it embarks on blaming the victims, and thus falling into justification, not explanation. Little wonder how this revolutionary-counterrevolutionary arch spells the fortunes and misfortunes of not only the Egyptian revolution but nearly of all Arab socialist uprisings. Certainly, Al-Aswany’s remarks connect directly with the Egyptian scenario, but in essence his remarks mirror most, if not all, Arab revolutions post 2011.

Pushing for a culturalist approximation of events counts among the reactionaries’ toolkit in a preexisting arsenal to regain hegemony. Given the brutal violence that marked the Egyptian revolution, the one which many activists fail to register as formalization of the subaltern’s dissatisfaction with the revolution, it is not surprising to mistake The Republic of False Truths as an exercise in oriental despotism. Female activists, like Asma, and after experiencing beatings and sexual abuse, utters statements that read more like self-pity. For her, it is hopeless to count on ordinary people as Egyptians are submissive by nature. Other characters too do not restrain themselves from drawing similar generalizations outside space and time as they express doubts vis-à-vis revolutionary change in a country where large sways of the populations are doubtful in the betterment of their lot. Asma’s letter to Mazen, sent from London after the former’s exile is probably the type of ranting that every revolutionary succumbs to in the face of adverse situations. Such despair risks eternalizing oriental despotism because it overlooks the dynamic of history. Despaired readings find the cliché of Oriental despotism comforting.

Al Aswany, not only rejects timeless generalizations. His spoke person is Mazen who from beginning to end underlines a historicist approximation as to why ordinary Egyptians—even well before instantiations of violence—traded security for freedom. Nevertheless, the heavy investment in media and the latter capacity for brainwashing rank-and-file Egyptian and demonizing the revolutionary youth—as specified by General Alwany’s explicit instructions—have simply born its fruits. In an exchange with the Interior Minister, General Alwany explicitly outlines his strategy: “Our goal is to tell the ordinary citizen, ‘Either you side with the demonstrations and lose your security, or you side with the state, in which case, it will protect you.” (142) Readers find that the business tycoon and media mogul, Hag Muhammad Shanawany, as per request of the Security Apparatus, have invested enormous funds and resources to ‘redirect Egyptians towards ‘the right path’: family values and the wisdom of the tested and tried’. His media prodigies go as far as ‘uncovering CIA plots of destabilizing the country and creating chaos’! Readers registers how Madam Nourhan, the celebrity broadcaster, has been hailed by Apparatus not only for literally abiding by the instructions set by the supervising army officer (set in the premises of every TV and radio station), but for her ‘innovative’ ways and quasi-effortless commitment in defaming revolutionaries, presenting fabricated testimonies that cast democracy activists as spies on the pay roll of foreign secret services. Through no fault of their own, the revolutionary committee realizes never without a cost that exclusive campaigning through Facebook and Twitter has its limits as large sways of Egyptians remain hooked up to newspapers and TV. By the time revolutionaries such as Ashraf started touring neighborhoods and featuring human right abuses committed by the military, it has become crystal clear that the it was too late. Therefore, any sensible reading cannot overlook that the triumph of the counterrevolution has been the result of steady and deliberate effort to rewrite history in favor of the counterrevolutionaries since they can afford this rewriting.

The final scene where Madany (literally signifying passivism in Arabic) or Khaled father’s, takes revenge from the police officer who killed Khaled. Al-Aswany through that scene kills two birds with one stone. On the first level, he breaks away with the liberal stance of situating revolutionary work entirely in passivist forms of agitation. His stance corroborates, however, with the inevitability of the class struggle, demonstrating affinity with Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the necessity of violence: where history simply takes its own course and classes become involved in a dynamic of cancelling each other. On the second, a milestone of theoretical clarity is gained from the failure of legalistic and procedural path and where justice fails to see the day of light. The crooked justice system in Egypt facilitates regaining that incendiary form of clarity. Not only the bereaved father refuses religious authority personified in Sheikh Shamil’s mediation as when the Sheikh visits Madany with a sack of cash in exchange for closing the case in court. Madany similarly indulges Khaled’s university colleagues for a while, agreeing with their plan of taking the murder case to court. Danaya, General Alwany’s daughter and Khaled’s close classmate and eye witness to the murder, asks Madany to relieve her from witnessing in court. Despite enamored admiration of and attachment to Khaled and his ideals, in the end, her admiration and attachment could not expand toward a revolutionary consciousness in the sense of a rupture with undeserved social status and privilege. That is how we read in the ultimate scene that the father hires thugs to kill the police officer. And that is how readers are not surprised as Madany successfully reverses the crooked justice system by taking justice (not just trying to) in his own hands.

The message from that scene helps readers seize the realization that revolutionary work cannot be a cerebral undertaking. It is and remains a spontaneous eruption and, in his circumstances, no one can convince Madany not to recourse to violence. He spontaneously takes that road not because he thinks only violence brings him a satisfying closure, but despite all rationalizations to the contrary. Readers find Madany has lived his entire life as a slave, literally from hand to mouth. But that dreadful experience subscribes in direct opposition to appearances. Galvanized by his prodigy, Danya asks Khaled: “When did you read all these books?” Khaled answers: “The credit should go to my father who noticed that I liked to read when I was small, so he gave me a subscription to the palace of culture. I began borrowing books, reading and returning them. Imagine that a simple, uneducated man could value reading so much!” (83) If there exists one hero in this novel, it is Madany because when catastrophe hits, he rationalizes light years better than university professors! As will be developed below, Madany deserves the title of Spartacus defying the decadent Roman empire.    

Madany’s decision is different from poetic justice in the sense that the latter is bourgeois whereas the former is prehistoric and can only be embraced by the subaltern. Both religious and civic authorities scold individuals from taking justice in their own hands, and thus encourage people stripped of their basic rights to aggravate servitude by seeking institutional mitigation of justice. In line with Hegel’s reference to deep history whereby he relatives political and cultural time^[4], Al-Aswany shows that institutional mitigation other than being essentially pointless, given how justice is administered under dictatorships, remains counterrevolutionary. Not only the police officer was not arrested in preparation of the trial, he wasn’t even suspended from work or put on probation during the months leading to the final sentence which unsurprisingly finds him not guilty. For the benefits of theoretical clarity again, Al-Aswany illustrates that Khaled’s killer’s show trial has to be read specifically not as a dysfunctionality of the justice system either in Egypt or elsewhere. Rather, it has to be read as part of an immanent logic of dictatorships, and which Khaled’s father clearly registers, acts upon and professionally executes.

Indeed, that last scene can be disturbing because Al-Aswany masterfully positions it in gothic aesthetics. In displaying the inevitability of violence, Al-Aswany brings a satisfying closure from the perspective of the class struggle to that other gothic scene that triggered the finale. In chapter forty, we read how Madany in his own hands puts pieces of Khaled’s brain back in the hole caused by the pistol shot. Khaled has been a principal organizer of a field hospital near Tahrir Square charged of providing first aid to demonstrators. The officer aims to kill because Khaled dares (note the word dare in Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment) to reject the officer’s insult. It is a scene which comes to shake passive readers from their reifying experience and keep these audiences forever invested. That gothic structure generates a movement within the consciousness of individuals of the middle class or who identify as middle class. It is a movement which renders that consciousness receptive (hospitable) to a prehistoric form and logic of justice, the primitive law: an eye for eye! All else becomes synthesized by the same invested audiences as alienation, domestication and obviously, counterrevolution.

The way Fanon theorizes revolutionary violence suggests how Al-Aswany cannot be stigmatized by calls that organically propagate beyond the accepted perimeters of passive resistance. By raising a credible threat over life, speaking and executing a language that truly hurts the ruling classes, the revolutionary ardor of Tahrir Square reaches the tipping point in the Hegelian system, whereby quantity metamorphizes to quality. Violence, Fanon specifies, remains purifying in the sense of ridding oneself of hesitations and doubts, thus crystallizing practical predispositions to register false truths for what they are. What else today’s revolutionaries hope to gain?   

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[1] Walid El Khachab, (2021) “Death of the Revolution, Death of the Event: Cinema and Politics in the Aftermath of the Egyptian Spring.” Journal of the African Literature Association, 15:3, p. 525.

[2] Simon Weil, An Anthology. Penguin Modern Classics. 2005. p.105

[3] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. The Merlin Press (2015), p. 3

[4] Hegel, Philosophy of Right.

Royal Mail’s annual pre-tax profits for 2021 have quadrupled compared with the previous year. Profits stem largely from the pandemic-fuelled online shopping boom. Pre-tax profit jumped to £726m in the year to 28 March, compared with £180m a year earlier.

The massive rise in profits has led to speculation that Royal Mail will return to the FTSE 100 in next month’s quarterly market value-based reshuffle. The company will reward its shareholders with a bumper payout of £400million.

While the pandemic has been good for business, it has been an unmitigated disaster for thousands of postal workers who have got sick with a growing number of fatalities. Many worry that they have a significant chance of catching a deadly virus every time they turn for work and pass it on to loved ones.

Dire sickness levels have seen some customers not receiving mail all week. Large areas of the country are not receiving mail due to skyrocketing sickness levels amongst postal workers. In one week alone in the run-up to Christmas, 32 offices I know about were hit by covid related sickness. Sickness levels are double 2018 levels.

While Covid has caused havoc in many offices around the country, an even greater cause of disruption has been the massive restructuring programme undertaken by Royal Mail with the intimate collaboration of the CWU (Communication Worker Union), hours and job cuts have been made to increase productivity and profits.

The current CEO Simon Thompson bragged, “Last year stood out as one of remarkable change at Royal Mail. It has been challenging at times, but we have learnt that we can deliver results and change at lightning pace when we are united by a common purpose.”

In the latest issue of the Courier, Thompson makes the extraordinary claim that 1700 revisions have taken place in the last six months beating the previous figure of 132 in twelve months.

Many of the revisions have been a disaster. It seems not a day goes by without pictures and videos being leaked to the press showing full grey sacks of mail piled high on top of each other. One office in London some walks not been taken out for weeks.

According to one source, many revisions have been so rushed ‘the revisions are delaying the post. It is a ‘computer says no’ scenario. The technology says the routes can be done, but it does not take into account roadworks, traffic jams and blocks of flats with 30 addresses the posties have to get to.’

Communication Workers Union

The massive increase in productivity achieved by Royal Mail courtesy of the new agreement could have only taken place because of the role played by the CWU. In many offices around the UK, the union policed implementing the new revisions, while the others were a collaboration between the union and Royal Mail management. So much so that it has been hard to tell where the union ends and Royal Mail management begins. As George Orwell said, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.[1]

The CWU’s ‘Pathway to Change Agreement’ between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) was hailed as a new way of working, and it would improve the working conditions of postal workers, and nothing of the sort has happened.

At Wakefield Delivery Office, West Yorkshire, the CWU suffered a rebuff when the structural revision agreed by managers was voted down by 94% of the workforce.

One aspect of the new agreement trumpeted by the CWU would be an end to bullying by managers, and this has patently not taken place. Revisions are now being imposed regardless of the workforce’s agreement, hours are cut, and absorption levels are going through the roof.[2] In many cases, postal workers are now doing more work than before the agreement.

Also, if the Covid crisis has proved one thing, it is the inability of the CWU(Communication Workers Union) to protect its workforce. The role of the CWU has been crucial during the latest pandemic. There is no way that Royal Mail would be operating, let alone making money, if it were not for the role of the CWU bureaucracy. The CWU offered postal workers up as the fifth emergency service, and postal workers are now increasingly needing to use the real emergency services.

While it is clear to many that the CWU has become an arm of corporate management, numerous pseudo-left[3] groups such as the SWP(Socialist Workers Party) contend that the CWU is still an organisation that will defend workers interests. The SWP held up the latest agreement between the union and Royal Mail as proof of this.

While there is growing opposition to Royal Mail and the CWU agreement from postal workers, the role of the SWP is to provide left and militant credentials to the union bureaucracy and disarm postal workers seeking to fight. The SWP hailed the new agreement pathway to Change Agreement’ saying it had stopped major attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions. This is a lie, and nothing of the sort has taken place. If anything, the attacks and the workload of postal workers have increased after the agreement.

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[1] Animal Farm-George Orwell

[2] Absorption. An agreement between Royal Mail and the CWU that when a postal worker goes sick his delivery is done by other postal workers on top of their own delivery.

[3] The term “pseudo-left” denotes political tendencies that utilize democratic and populist phraseology to advance the interests of privileged sections of the upper middle class and defend capitalism against socialist revolution. There are many representatives of this politically reactionary tendency internationally, including the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, Socialist Alternative in Australia, the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the NSSP in Sri Lanka. https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/pseudoleft.html

A Lot Of Sex But Not Much Revolution

A Lot Of Sex But Not Much Revolution

— Read on atrumpetofsedition.org/2021/12/25/a-lot-of-sex-but-not-much-revolution/

Review: Paul Flewers and John McIlroy (editors) 1956: John Saville, EP Thompson and The Reasoner Merlin Press, 2016, pp450, £20.

Thanks for reviewing our book. There are two points I’d like to make.

Firstly, we decided to republish the three issues of The Reasoner in 2016 because it was the sixtieth anniversary of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Hungarian Uprising and the publication of The Reasoner, which came about because of the ructions within the CPGB and the Stalinist movement worldwide caused by the ‘Secret Speech’ and subsequently by the events in Hungary. We were both surprised that only fragments of what was an important journal had ever been republished, and felt that all three issues should be republished in full, along with selected related documents and retrospective appraisals. That the many admirers of Thompson’s writings did not themselves take on this task over the those 60 years is an interesting question.

Secondly, your assertion that we ‘largely provide Thompson and Saville with a pseudo-left cover for their anti-Marxist positions’ is misplaced. In our three pieces, we make it clear that neither Saville nor Thompson broke cleanly from Stalinism and that they both continued to adhere to classic aspects of Stalinism, most notably popular frontism, as can be seen especially in Thompson’s anti-nuclear-weapon campaigning. In my essay on Thompson and Stalinism, I noted both his inability to present a coherent analysis of Stalinism, and his hostility to Trotskyism that he inherited from his Stalinist days.

Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell-Katherine Angel 10.99 Paperback 368 Pages / Published: 03/07/2014

Daddy Issues-Katherine Angel £6.00 Paperback 128 Pages / Published: 13/06/2019

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again-Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel hardback £10.99-160 pages / March 2021 / 9781788739160-Verso publications

“Once in a while, a book appears that is so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudo poetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell”.

Cristina Nehring

“Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism.”

― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex.”

― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Passion and expression are not really separable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind, which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going”.

De Rougement, Denis. Love in the Western World.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, 173. Print.

“Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

Virginia Wolfe

It is hard to fathom why a gifted academic historian would write three largely substandard books that, from an intellectual level, hardly rise above the magazine Tit-Bits.

It is usually the case that a person who talks a lot about sex is not getting any, but this is evidently not the case for Angel, who appears to be getting more than her fair share. Given her significant number of sexual conquests, you would have thought she would change her name.

All three books were written amidst the rise of the #MeToo movement, and one would hate to believe that they were written purely to make the author and her publisher’s a lot of money. They do not seem to serve any other purpose than this.

Also, I fail to see how writing about your sex life can enlighten young women about the huge sexual, social, political and economic problems they confront within a capitalist society. None of the books situates women’s sexuality within the context of history, and this must be a deliberate act because Angel is not unfamiliar with the plight of women under capitalism. A single reading of Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,[1] would give young women a deeper insight into the problems they deal with on a daily basis than these three books put together.

These books are a product of the ‘MeToo# movement, and they reflect the domination of postmodernism inside academia. It is not a very healthy atmosphere. As Cristina Nehring writes, “In the groves of academe that Angel inhabits, sex is anything but a laughing matter. The relation of Anglo-American academics to sexuality remains a troubled one—at once obsessive and puritanical, criminalising and infantilising—even in our day and even (or especially) in disciplines specifically devoted to gender studies. This is a culture where a graduate student can cry sexual harassment if her academic adviser closes his door during office hours but turn around and solicit congratulations for personal tell-alls bearing titles with some variation on Vagina, which inflict far more violence on her intimate space than any indiscretion she has ever charged. (More or less, this is the career path of Naomi Wolf”.[2]

Unmastered is a very strangely structured book, with most of the book being blank pages, and some pages only have a few lines on them. Angel had a very tolerant editor, and the book stretches to 368 pages.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect has been the largely sycophantic reviews from reviewers who seem more interested in safeguarding their highly paid salaries than calling out a poorly written book. “It is hard to overestimate . . . [the] exquisite sensuality” of Angel’s book, its “artfulness” and “richness,” wrote Olivia Laing, or this one from Publishers Weekly which called the book “ghostly and poetic.”. It is hard to choose which comment makes you want to vomit the most.

One of the more perceptive reviewers, Cristina Nehring[3], poses the question. “Why is it that a book as bad as this garners reasonable reviews and makes it to America from the United Kingdom? The answer seems to lie in the ingredients’ combination—if not the quality or authenticity. Unmastered purports to combine philosophy with fellatio, intellect with erotica. It allows us to be voyeurs and lawyers at the same time. It gives us a good conscience reading porn But in truth? Unmastered does porn a disservice. Not to side with Angel’s maligned professor, but real porn is a lot more “democratic” than this: It includes flesh-and-blood people—not the two-dimensional “hypostasized” extras of this book. It also focuses on a few different body parts—not only on the author’s navel.”.[4]

Angel’s postmodernist language obscures rather than enlightens her readers. Like many academics of her generation, her reliance on pseudo-left philosophers like Foucault is problematical. Foucault emphasised the necessity of developing micro-politics and micro-struggles. Such a strategy appeals to advocates of single-issue type politics: separatists and nationalists of every shade, environmentalists, and utopian feminists, like Angel.

Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a philosopher from an early age. He studied with Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Superièure. For a brief time, Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, leaving in 1951. Although breaking organisationally from the French CP, he never broke politically and philosophically and retained much of its anti-classical Marxism and anti-Trotskyist baggage. He later became a leading member of The Frankfurt School.

Angel’s musings on pornography are hardly groundbreaking. One does not have to be a Marxist to understand that sexual relationships under capitalism have largely been turned into a commodity or, as the Marxist writer Emanuele Saccarelli puts it in a comment on the movie Boogie Nights,[5] “The subject of pornography naturally leads toward these considerations. Pornography is the commodification of sexual relations, a more modern, sanitised, impersonal, and therefore more peculiarly bourgeois form of prostitution. Instead of accepting the moralistic posturing of the defenders of the status quo, one must consider the possibility that, far from being a perverse deviation from the dominant values of a capitalist society, pornography might be the most logical and limpid translation of bourgeois values into the sexual sphere. Boogie Nights decisively points in that direction. Acts and relations that are natural and spontaneous are turned into commodities to be purchased and sold.[6]

Angel seems to be more intent on titillation than a social and political comment. Asking a question in a lecture, she states, “given that orgasm during vaginal sex is elusive for many women, and clitoral stimulation is crucial, how then is clitoral pleasure represented in the swathes of pornography you have surveyed?” Politics are absent in her writings, and she writes nothing of the growing attempt to increase state censorship in the guise of a clampdown on pornography.

Angel’s use of Virginia Woolf, who wrote the groundbreaking book A Room of One’s Own, is legitimate. Her book unmastered was taken from a line in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, “Why do we like the frantic, the unmastered?”. Wolfe also wrote, “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple.” Angel likes this quote so much she repeats it several times. Wolfe is worth reading, and the modern woman can learn a lot from her books. As the writer, David Walsh perceptively puts it, “In Woolf’s work, in my view, there is always a conflict between a rather anaemic and claustrophobic upper-middle-class self-involvement and a more penetrating, sharp-eyed and self-critical approach to reality. She referred once to her “terror of real-life” and, unhappily, there is something to the comment.

The attraction to social reformism had perhaps both class and psychological roots. In any event, the emphasis in her works on ordinariness, the incremental, the mundane seems in part the literary corollary of the Fabian’s “gradualism” and “socialism through attrition.” One can certainly argue whether Woolf grasped or was capable of grasping the depth of the social crisis in Britain in Mrs Dalloway, a book published on the eve of the bitterly fought General Strike of 1926. The novelist always draws back from the sharpest criticism. Nonetheless, there is in every one of Woolf’s works a genuine concern with the welfare of humanity and the state of society, and not simply, as we find in The Hours, a complacent celebration of the privileged Manhattanite’s daily routine. While Woolf had one foot in the camp of official society, she was able to bring to bear an honest and questioning intellect to her work.”[7]

Angel’s book Daddy Issues was published by Peninsula Press in 2019. It is largely a bland work devoid of controversy, serious political comment, or analysis, much like her previous books. Many of the book reviews have a similar modus operandi, and Mia Levitan’s review is the pick of the bunch, being largely uncritical and blindly complimentary.

The basic premise of Daddy Issues is that if only men could become better parents, or in her words, ‘We need to keep the modern, civilised father on the hook, the world would be a good and safe place for young women to grow up in. Angel’s book is a muddled mess. She writes, “Contemporary feminism has, however, re-embraced thinking about the big ideas – capitalism, work, care – and the concept of patriarchy is having a resurgence. In the waves of marches after Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has featured heavily on banners; it circulates widely in highly instagrammable commodities, on t-shirts, on mugs, on tote bags. It is rolling around the mouths of pundits, commentators, and politicians. It has made a public comeback.[8]

By “contemporary feminism”, she means the MeToo#movement, which is neither anti-capitalist, progressive or utopian in any way. Again according to Walsh, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day”.[9]

Angel’s choice of Trump as a bad father is baffling. Trump is a monster and a terrible father by any stretch of the imagination. But that aside, he is an American fascist, which Angel seems to have left out of her book. Why is Trump’s fascism not written about in Angel’s book, which is far more dangerous than Trump being a sexist pig? or bad father. I mean, did Hitler plunge mankind into a murderous war and carry out the holocaust because he was a bad lover.

In 2021, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent were published by Verso. This book leans heavily on the French philosopher Michel Foucault book The History of Sexuality. Angel is a utopian without being a socialist, saying, “My utopian ideal is if we could live in a society where everybody could feel their vulnerability and try to ride it with excitement. That we would not have to harden ourselves against that vulnerability, whether in the form of very inflexible notions of our desires or very inflexible contracts or in the form of insisting, as in the consent rhetoric, that we know exactly what we want. Because not always knowing is part of the pleasure of life and sex, unfortunately, it also makes it very risky”.

As was said earlier, Angel’s choice of Focualt as her guide on sexuality is troubling. She writes of Foucault. “I think it was a very wry phrase (Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again) in this incredibly sardonic and playful book that he was writing, in kind of oblique opposition, I would say, to the countercultural movement of the ’60s and ’70s, where there was a real faith being placed partly in psychoanalysis and also in Marxism as the roots out of sexual repression. So it was a reading of this kind of possible future with the tools to un-repress ourselves and emancipate ourselves from social oppression. And that these tools would finally kind of reveal this ‘better tomorrow’ where we would be free from the shackles around sexuality”.

To clarify, the uninitiated Focualt was never an orthodox Marxist, and was part of a coterie of philosophers and writers that coalesced around the Frankfurt School[10]. Foucault’s writing on sexuality are largely worthless and reflect his general philosophy “that the objective world is not a world of facts that can be objectively probed and studied; instead, Foucault’s world consists of discourses, stories—interpretations lacking any secure means of determining which “discourse” is superior”.

To conclude, it is not difficult to sum up, the value of these three books. Like many books written under the auspices of the MeToo# movement, they are not worth the paper they are written upon, and they do not advance the struggle for female emancipation one iota.

The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once said, “Women’s suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat. The worst and most brutal advocates of the exploitation and enslavement of the proletariat are entrenched behind the throne and altar as well as behind the political enslavement of women. Monarchy and women’s lack of rights have become the most important tools of the ruling capitalist class”.[11] Angel should read some of her work. Maybe her next book on sex will be good.

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[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm

[2] https://www.bookforum.com/print/2002/an-academic-s-sexual-memoir-puts-the-ire-in-desire-11683

[3] Cristina Nehring is the author of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century (Harper, 2009) and Journey to the Edge of the Light (Kindle Singles, 2011). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Slate, New York magazine, and Condé Nast Traveler

[4] https://www.bookforum.com/contributor/cristina-nehring

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogie_Nights

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/07/boog-j04.html

[7] Virginia Woolf cannot be held responsible- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/hour-j23.html

[8] https://granta.com/daddy-issues/

[9] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html

[10] The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique-David North- Mehring Books-Incorporated, 2015

[11] Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle-(1912)- https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1912/05/12.htm

“My body is best understood as a series of incontinent musings, which skip back and forth over her 30 years of existence. She effectively treats the reader as a therapist, much like the real one she says she sees twice a week”.[1]

Ella Whelan

“The wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails appears as a ‘gigantic collection of commodities’, and the singular commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth. Our investigation begins accordingly with the analysis of the commodity. A commodity is first an external object, a thing which satisfies through its qualities human needs of one kind or another. The nature of these needs is irrelevant, e.g., whether their origin is in the stomach or in the fancy. We are also not concerned here with the manner in which the entity satisfies human need, whether in an immediate way as food – that is, as an object of enjoyment – or by a detour as means of production.

Karl Marx[2]

“The expression ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ or variants like ‘the emperor has no clothes’ are difficult to explain briefly and are most easily understood by looking at its source, that is, Hans Christian Anderson’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837.”

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-emperors-new-clothes.html

There are no two ways about it. This is a terrible book, and it looks like the only reason it was published is to make the author and the publisher significant amounts of money. In the words of one reviewer, it is “shallow, solipsistic and more self-indulgent than a teenager’s diary”. From an intellectual standpoint, the book barely rises above a Mills and Boon book. Any young woman looking to navigate this world would probably find more insight in a Mills and Boon book or the pages of Tit-bits[3] than this so-called collection of essays. Also, it is stretching things to call these meanderings a collection of essays. 

Ratajkowski’s claims to be more than a supermodel woman. She writes that “it is “frustrating that society somehow feels that women cannot be political, feminist, and a sex symbol’. This claim does not hold water. There is no real politics here.  “I love wearing lacy thongs” is not exactly a Communist Manifesto. Given that we have just passed through the greatest capitalist crisis since the 1930s and witnessed millions of people needlessly dying from a virus, Ratajkowski’s says nothing about these developments in her self indulgent comic book. 

You cannot blame parents for everything a child does in later life, but Ratajkowski’s parents must take some responsibility for Ratajkowski’s God-given body and her drive to make as much money out of it as she can. Her rape and sexual assault allegations by teenage boyfriends, photographers, must be taken seriously and should have involved a police investigation. Unfortunately, Ratajkowski sees them as simply an occupational hazard. It is bizarre that she even went to the funeral of one of her alleged rapists. 

Ratajkowski‘s book, if unwittingly, is a condemnation of the #MeToo movement. Her tedious musings are the product of a movement that is not genuinely carrying out a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. All they want is a slice of the pie, no matter the cost. I cannot entirely agree with everything Ella Whelan writes, but she is spot on when she writes about Ratajkowski “she also seems to revel in her perceived lack of agency. She is always at the mercy of men and the male gaze. At one point, Ratajkowski writes of how, while holidaying on an island, she realized that making money from a picture of her backside was not particularly empowering. ‘The whole of the ocean stretched out before me’, she writes, ‘and yet I felt trapped there is something discomfiting, too, about Ratajkowski’s attitude to the sexist (and rather dangerous-sounding) male promoters, fixers and bookers she encounters. On the one hand, she condemns and criticizes them. Yet she’s still happy to accept their favours, which, in one case, included a free trip to Coachella… tickets to the festival, a place to stay, and a ride out to the desert in a limo bus.

It is reminiscent of the way dozens of Hollywood actresses, at the peak of #MeToo, condemned the despicable Harvey Weinstein and said they always knew he was a creep – yet they were all too happy to keep schtum about his misogyny at the time so they could pursue their careers. Plenty of us have been in similar situations, of course. But, unlike Ratajkowski, we would not expect others to sympathize with us for putting ourselves first”.[4]

One of the more dangerous aspects of the #MeToo movement is its complete disregard and trampling on the democratic rights of its victims. One such right is innocent until proven guilty as Eric London points out, “the right to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is among the foundational principles upon which many other significant legal protections depend. If the accused are presumed guilty, then the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, and the right to remain silent would be substantially weakened”.[5]

Ratajkowski’s so-called left politics (she wore a Bernie Sanders tee-shirt) are a fake. Her politics are more geared to making even more money than prosecuting a real struggle against capitalism. Using one quote on vanity from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing does not make her a revolutionary. Berger was not a Marxist, but now and again, he had something worth saying. As David Walsh wrote, “since Berger’s death a month ago, numerous “left” media obituaries have recounted the events of his life, explained that he was a political radical and egalitarian in his views, noted both his influences and those he influenced, and pointed out how humane and informed his views were. He was a “non-party” or “contradictory” socialist, an iconoclast, who eschewed fame and fortune, choosing to live for decades in a remote rural part of France. These facts are accurate enough, as far as they go, but the obituaries generally avoid the more complex questions, especially in regard to someone habitually, if mistakenly, referred to as a “Marxist” critic.[6]

Maybe Ratajkowski should have used this quote from Berger, which would have made her point slightly more believable “The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity but a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”[7]

One of the more troubling aspects stemming from this book has been the sheer volume of sycophantic reviews. It would appear that a large number of highly paid writers have not only lost their heads but their grip on reality. Maybe they like Ratajkowski, do not give a rats arse about artistic integrity unless it makes them some money. There is an air of the emperor’s new clothes about most of these reviews.

Whether she likes it or not, Ratajkowski has become a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, no matter how corrupt. From a moral standpoint, I fear for her soul. But I somehow doubt Ratajkowski cares that much. She has a very nice bed in which to play. On a more serious note, I would encourage any young woman looking to navigate her way through life can do no worse than study the work of a real revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, whose work can be found at the Marxist Internet Archive[8] 

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[1] https://www.spiked-online.com/author/ella-whelan/

[2] The Commodity- Marx 1867 (Capital)- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit-Bits

[4] https://www.spiked-online.com/author/ella-whelan/

[5] The #MeToo campaign versus the presumption of innocence- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/05/inno-o05.html

[6] John Berger, radical art critic, 1926-2017- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/07/berg-f07.html

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/a-life-in-quotes-john-berger

[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/index.htm

Dear Sir,

On November 23, 2021, your newspaper published an article entitled “Radiohead’s interactive ‘exhibition’ pushes music and games into new territory” by Tom Faber[1]

Faber’s article carried a quote from the rock band Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke. Yorke said “ “When we first started thinking about it, we intended to build a physical exhibition in a central London location, on a Play Station blog. It was going to be a huge red construction made by welding shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington. This astounding steel carapace would be inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky. Jutting up into the grey English sky. And then – being constructed from shipping containers – we could ship it around the world… New York, Tokyo, Paris.

Yorke’s flippant and ignorant comment regarding the assassination of the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky is bad enough, but as Faber did not comment or condemn it, I can assume that he and the Financial Times celebrate the Stalinist murder of Leon Trotsky.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of savage repression between 1936 and 1940 that targeted the socialist working class and intelligentsia. Within the Soviet Union, Stalin’s decision to eradicate socialist opposition to his regime resulted in approximately one million executions. The victims included the Trotskyist opposition and all those who had played a significant role in the October Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Republic. The Stalinist terror claimed the lives of major Soviet writers, scientists, and artists.

I demand you retract the article and issue an apology. I will, however, not hold my breath. Nor will I wait for you to publish this letter in your newspaper. This letter will be published on my website-atrumpetofsedition.org.

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[1] https://www.ft.com/content/eb18c19a-d568-4436-991c-d4e302a3cdc0

“Style is the Man”,

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]

“Style is the man.”

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.

3.   Higgin’s writings for what they are worth can be accessed here. https://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/index.htm

4.   The SLL’s Labour Review – https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/lr/

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption

[2]https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1947/05/debate.html

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/16.html 

[4] Ten Years for the Locust-British Trotskyism 1938–1948-https://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1963/xx/10years.htm

“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.

 [1] Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24-abs.htm

[2] E.P. Thompson: class struggle and historical materialism-https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1993/isj2-061/mcnally.htm

[3] See Vadim Rogovin’s 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror-https://mehring.com/product/1937-stalins-year-of-terror/

[4] http://isj.org.uk/memories-of-a-seminal-year/

[5] Labour Review October –November 1959 edition,

[6] “The New left Must Look to the Working Class”

[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.

[8] https://www.mi5.gov.uk/the-soviet-threat-between-the-wars 

W

“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.”

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[1] What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 23 [back]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin

[3] Chance and Necessity in History: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared

Author(s): Ann Talbot: Historical Social Research , 2009, Vol. 34, No. 2

[4] Once Again on the “Crisis of Marxism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/marxism.htm

[5] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[6] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/don-t-ask-a-historian-what-history-is

[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

eidenfeld & Nicolson, 352pp, £20