David Unger kindly interrupted his holiday to answer these questions. David’s splendid new book In My Eyes You Are Beautiful has just been published in English. It is available on Amazon.

Q. Given that there is no translator’s name on the book, I assume you translated this book into English. Did you incur any problems? Secondly, why did it take so long to appear in English?

A. Actually, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful—like all my novels—was written in English. I left Guatemala when I was four, though I spent eight summers there living with my grandparents in downtown Guatemala City. Para mi, eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent wasn’t able to sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man. Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C. issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, perhaps it can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has both personal and universal appeal.

Q. As both a writer and translator, may I ask your opinion on the use of A.I.?

A. Oh my, Keith, that’s quite a question! Personally, I don’t think A.I. can capture the subtleties or nuances that transform good writing into great writing. I can’t see A.I. composing:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.

Coral is far more red than her lips red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

As for translation, again, I would say that the poetry and the humour would be lost. Last year, Penguin Classics published my re-translation of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr President, which is now in its 4th edition. I can’t imagine A.I. capturing the richness of this fantastic novel completed nearly 100 years ago!

Q. You have an extraordinary gift of combining Fiction with historical events. There seems to be a tradition among Latin American writers. Could you tell me your early influences?

A. That’s kind of you to say, Keith. All my novels have taken place during a particular historical moment in Guatemala, whether it be during the 1930s when a Fascist president sold the soul of the country to the United Fruit Company or during the armed conflict in Guatemala from the 70s to the 90’s. I can’t imagine writing a novel without a strong political backdrop. I think of The Mastermind, which has been translated into ten languages, as primarily a love story, but it is also a kind of cautionary tale which reveals that love, friendship and community are impossible when the political and economic system is corrupt and corrupted. My teachers were Rulfo and Vargas Llosa, but also Steinbeck, Austen and Joyce.

Q. As I said before, the book marries fictional characters with historical events. How much research do you have to do to make sure your work is historically accurate?

A. I did a lot of reading on history and economics in preparing to write The Price of Escape. I wanted the novel to be a personal story of an indecisive Jewish man arriving in the port city of Puerto Barrios, but again with the backdrop of the United Fruit Company and its monomaniacal stranglehold on Guatemala during the 1930s. The novel is a kind of “what if” story about my father, but with quite a lot of fabrication and transformation. My other novels grew out of what I already knew about my birth country—it was more of a question of figuring out how to tell the stories that I wanted to tell.

Q. Your characters in the book are extremely real and alive. Are they completely made up, or are they an amalgam of real people?

Q. Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists who were from a privileged class, and in this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticized or mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s, the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and their crops meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because of that, she is able to transform her life from one of servitude to one of independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like figure.

Q. I saw on Facebook that you took the marvellous step of taking the book to schools in Guatemala. Could you briefly tell me the response of the children?

A. I participated in Guatemala’s FILGUA—its international book fair last month. F y G Editores published the Spanish version of Sleeping With the Lights On, and the publisher, Raul Figueroa, arranged for me to visit a public elementary school nearby. The school had no library, and the fifth and sixth graders had never seen a writer. They were thrilled to meet me, but to be honest, I received so much more from them: I was so grateful for their curiosity, enthusiasm and comments about my little chapter book.

Q. What has been the media response to the book? Has the right-wing press in Guatemala attacked the book?

A. The novel was first published in Mexico by a PRH imprint in 2011 and then published in Guatemala in 2014 to coincide with my receiving Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’s Literature Prize for lifetime achievement. The novel has been out of print now for about three years, and Denise Phe-Funchal, who translated Sleeping With the Lights On, is preparing a new translation. On several occasions, indigenous Guatemalan women came up to me and thanked me for telling “their story.” Well, it’s really just one story, but something touched them and that meant the world to me. I don’t expect the same reaction to the English edition, but I do hope that the book gets some coverage. Quien sabe? Maybe a good handful of readers will find that the novel touched them deeply.

Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad.

He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

My day has a pretty fixed routine. When I get up, I normally check my incoming e-mail and then go on to look at my google alerts to see what has been post online since the preceding day. There are some blogs dealing with early modern history that I normally look at as well.

In recent years, I have developed a database covering the local history societies in my native county and letting the officers of those societies have information about the activities  – lectures, meetings and trips – being organised elsewhere. Most but not all such local history societies have websites but some do not give full details of their events or their locations. I have been surprised to discover that a few people do not wish to receive such information and ask to be struck off  my list of contacts. One such request reached me this morning from the son of one of the officers of a nearby society to which I have spoken in the past: no reason was given. More cheerfully, I met the chairman of my own village history society in the local chemist’s premises this morning.

I was pleased too to see on Sandy Solomon’s Facebook page a picture of two of my friends, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, on a visit to Canons Ashby, a house built by Erasmus Dryden, in Northamptonshire. I first met them both in the former Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London in about 1980. Peter had by then completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge and taken a lecturing post at Bedford College, in the University of London. Richard, to the best of my recollection, was engaged in his research into the Forced Loan of 1626-1628. They were both highly interesting to talk to and engaging companions in the tea/coffee room of the P.R.O. I should add that the tea or coffee on sale there was pretty horrible. Ann Hughes was also about at that time.

The rest of my morning was spent looking for a piece by Penelope Corfield that I saw a couple of days ago but can no longer find. I remember her from the time when she beat me to a lecturing job at what was then Bedford College in the University of London.

I was more successful in reading a piece by Lorina P. Repina, a Russian historian, on the academic.edu site. She is based in the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences and considered the ‘Writing practices in the space of intercultural interaction’. I am sorry to say that I did not find it particularly enlightening but, in general terms, I am interested in the historiographical products of eastern European countries, especially when they touch upon the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

It is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of historians working there or their ingenuity in re-working the conclusions of scholars able to access the major documentary repositories here or in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and Spain. Partly because of an apparent lack of personal contact with historians in these countries or in North America, there seems in some cases to be a time lag with a consequent reliance on figures like Tawney, Hill, Stone and others as if their works still commanded the fields they were interested in. One can find historians in south America – in Brazil, for example, where Christopher Hill enjoys a kind of cult following – who share their concerns but who are much better acquainted with more recent studies. I am not sure what can be done about this situation but it does make reading the works of eastern European historians challenging, interesting and often puzzling. 

wsws.org

How did Ward, Furey and the CWU Postal Executive get away with imposing their hated pro-company agreement against Royal Mail workers? This question cannot be answered outside of the role played by “pseudo-left” groups who posed as workers friends, but who protected the bureaucracy from a rank-and-file rebellion. This is an an Important article.

One month has passed since the Communication Workers Union (CWU) led by Dave Ward and Andy Furey succeeded in pushing through their pro-company “Business Recovery, Growth and Transformation Agreement” in a ballot whose results were announced July 11.

The impact of the CWU’s agreement is already being felt by tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers: punitive new attendance procedures and reduced sick pay; the shuttering of parcel collection offices; cuts to indoor sorting time forcing delivery workers to pound the streets for longer with impossible workloads; unknown numbers earmarked for redeployment and redundancy as automated super hubs come into operation.

Ward and Furey are despised figures among militant postal workers. Thousands have resigned from the union, while discussions are underway at delivery offices and mail centres on the lessons of the year-long dispute.

The struggle at Royal Mail has exposed the unbridgeable gulf between the privileged bureaucracy serving as an arm of corporate management, and the membership.

Rank-and-file opposition erupted —just four months into the dispute—after the CWU’s cancellation of strikes following legal threats from the company. Workers began denouncing Ward and Furey, demanding action to defeat the company’s aggressive “revisions” to terms and conditions. But the CWU stared this down, entering talks at conciliation service ACAS and allowing the company to impose its workplace agenda through bullying and coercion.

From October through March, the World Socialist Web Site’s coverage of the dispute won a growing audience among Royal Mail workers. Its exposure of the CWU’s pro-company agenda chimed with the sentiments of thousands of workers who were determined to fight.

This led to the formation of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) on April 2, 2023. The committee advocated a path of independent struggle against the CWU bureaucracy. Affiliated to the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), it forged links with postal workers in Belgium, Germany, Australia and the United States. The committee’s statements circulated widely at Royal Mail, especially after the CWU’s pro-company agreement was published in April.

Between April and June, the CWU bureaucracy was plunged into crisis, terrified that workers’ anger would coalesce into organised mass resistance, breaking its stranglehold over the dispute.

The rank-and-file committee won a sympathetic hearing among postal workers, but Ward and Furey maintained control and were able to ram through the company’s attacks. Their ability to do so was made possible by Britain’s pseudo-left organisations. Groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Workers Power intervened throughout the dispute to promote illusions that the CWU bureaucracy could be pressured to fight for workers’ interests, concealing its fundamental role as an arm of corporate management and the state.

These groups, representing sections of the upper middle class including those with lucrative positions in the apparatus of the trade unions, formed the “left” flank of efforts by the Stalinist Morning Star, the pro-Corbyn Canary and newly formed campaign group Enough is Enough to protect the labour and trade union bureaucracy from a rank-and-file insurgency, block the fight for socialism and channel workers behind a future Labour government.

Dave Ward’s political backers

In April, Ward addressed an online meeting of CWU reps, attacking “extreme political groups who sometimes look to infiltrate trade unions” and who have “no interest in you and the future of this company”. Acknowledging widespread opposition to the CWU’s pro-company agreement, he declared, “What I don’t accept is that they [political groups] should over-influence our members in this particular dispute.”

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with Dave Ward (right), General Secretary of the CWU, August 1, 2016. [Photo by Anthony Devlin, PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo]

Ward’s attack was a pathetic attempt to whip-up prejudices against socialism and Marxism while he and the CWU sought to “over-influence” workers on behalf of Royal Mail shareholders. In his 1998 essay, “Why are trade unions hostile to socialism?”, David North reviewed the historical development of trade unions from the mid-19th century, showing their universal tendency to suppress the class struggle, which finds its most conscious expression in the union bureaucracy’s hostility to socialism: “Standing on the basis of capitalist production relations, the trade unions are, by their very nature, compelled to adopt a hostile attitude toward the class struggle. Directing their efforts toward securing agreements with employers that fix the price of labor-power and determine the general conditions in which surplus-value will be pumped out of the workers, the trade unions are obligated to guarantee that their members supply their labor-power in accordance with the terms of the negotiated contracts. As Gramsci noted, ‘The union represents legality, and must aim to make its members respect that legality.’ The defense of legality means the suppression of the class struggle.”

While Ward and the bureaucracy repeatedly attacked the WSWS, they promoted the Labour Party and its right-wing politics. Labour MP Darren Jones was invited by the CWU to its national briefing of reps on April 21, presented as the saviour of postal workers and given a standing ovation. Jones publicly supported the CWU’s surrender document.

The Socialist Workers Party are expert at providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, while serving to politically block any independent movement of the working class.

The SWP’s long-established theory of the trade unions is one that justifies the bureaucracy’s domination over the working class. According to the SWP, “the bureaucracy play a contradictory role within capitalism. On the one hand, their role is to fight for the interests of workers. On the other, their function is to resolve the tensions between workers and bosses… But it is more complex than simply saying that trade union leaders’ role and experience mean that they will always mechanically sell out”. This is because, “Even only at the level of the bureaucracy, there is a range of different pressures interacting and shaping the development of any dispute… The combination of these pressures in particular moments in a dispute can tip the balance in one direction. The dynamic is not black and white.”

The “dynamic” being described is that of the SWP’s slavish defence of the bureaucracy. This was on full display at Royal Mail. While the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS called for the formation of rank-and-file committees to draw up strike demands and seize control of the dispute from the CWU bureaucracy, the SWP disarmed postal workers in the face of an impending betrayal. Less than three weeks before the CWU unveiled its pro-company agreement, it posted an article, “CWU union leaders could call new Royal Mail strikes,” urging them to launch “hard hitting action to bring Thompson and the board to their knees.”

Socialist Worker March 24 article, “CWU union leaders could call new Royal Mail strikes” [Photo: screenshot: socialist worker]

The CWU bureaucracy were then deep in talks with Royal Mail at ACAS, facilitated by former Trades Union Congress president Sir Brendan Barber, aimed at retaining their long-standing partnership with the company. Its only disagreement with workplace revisions was that they were being implemented unilaterally, instead of via agreement with CWU national officials.

After the negotiators’ agreement was published, the SWP adapted to workers’ angry denunciations of Ward and Furey. An April 21 article, “It will take organisation to stop this deal”, presented the fight entirely in organisational terms, urging only that “Workers should vote to reject the deal when it is put to a ballot—and demand more, harder-hitting strikes immediately.” But who was going to organise such strikes? The SWP’s suggestion that a “No” vote would pressure the bureaucracy to escalate the struggle was pure fantasy. Most workers who later voted for the agreement did so because they recognised a “no” vote by itself would not defeat the surrender document under conditions where the CWU executive was already implementing the company’s savage assault.

Spooked by the prominence of the WSWS and the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee, the SWP rushed to promote a series of bogus “rank-and-file” initiatives, including Postal Workers Say Vote No, NHS Workers Say Vote No and Strike Map. These united the SWP with sections of the trade union bureaucracy, Corbynites and other pseudo-left groups such as Counterfire and Workers Power to direct rank-and-file opposition back behind the bureaucracy.

On April 25, the Socialist Worker reported one such event, “Build the strikes, link the fights, reject bad deals”. It cited a key participant from the National Education Union (NEU) who explained the group’s purpose was to “push trade union leaders to move forward”. The SWP urged support for a model resolution by Strike Map’s steering group (aligned politically to Corbyn) calling on the “leading bodies” of the NEU, Royal College of Nursing, and British Medical Association to “coordinate future strike dates” and “force action from the government”. The unions’ “leading bodies” took no notice of such appeals. Both the NEU and RCN cancelled industrial action to ram through below-inflation pay deals negotiated with the Sunak government.

Workers Power

Workers Power, a splinter group from the SWP buried in the Labour Party, played a critical role for the CWU bureaucracy in heading off a genuine rank-and-file rebellion.

On April 21, Workers Power member Andy Young, a CWU rep from Leeds sacked during the dispute, wrote to the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) asking to join. He was invited to attend its Zoom meeting on April 23, where he opposed the committee’s formation, claiming it was “premature”. He then voted to abstain on the committee’s resolution adopted by postal workers in attendance, “Organise to defeat CWU-Royal Mail agreement: Vote NO! Reinstate all victimised workers! Build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee!”

The next day, Young set up “Postal Workers Say Vote No”, a Facebook group which attracted hundreds of postal workers based on its purported opposition to the CWU’s surrender document.

On May 3, Young wrote again to the PWRFC, asking it to support the “no” campaign initiated by Workers Power, including financial help to distribute a “model motion” drafted for CWU branches. The model motion typified the two-faced character of Young’s group. It began with the claim that, “The Business, Recovery, Growth and Transformation Agreement has blocked a few of the worst policies Royal Mail tried to impose on workers and our union, but it has conceded on others and is a big step back in terms of pay, terms and conditions, and guarantees.”

The PWRFC replied to Young:

“Your opposition to the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee reflects your defence of the bureaucracy. That is why you refused to endorse the committee’s resolution. You cited at our meeting the 2007 ‘vote no’ initiative by you and other activists as a model for the ‘open campaign’ you are proposing—based on its endorsement by a lone member of CWU’s postal executive which supposedly ‘allowed us to launch it on a much larger scale’. This is a rebellion on one’s knees. It ended in defeat and blocked a genuine fight by postal workers.

“Your real aim is an alliance with a faction of the bureaucracy against the workers. At our meeting, you stated that a ‘no’ campaign must be based on a ‘united front’ with workers, reps and CWU ‘officials that want to reject the deal, as long as they put no conditions on that’. But where are these phantom officials? You have invented an opposition from CWU officials so that you can rule out a struggle against this bureaucracy.

“The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee is open to all workers who want to defeat the CWU’s sell-out deal. We will not allow the committee’s freedom of action to be compromised by the types of alliances and backroom manoeuvres that typify the efforts of your Workers Power group, the SWP and similar outfits that function as ‘left’ advisors to the trade union bureaucracy.”

Statement by Postal Workers Say No, July 27, 2023. [Photo: Screenshot]

Workers Power used the Postal Workers Say Vote No group to promote fruitless appeals to the CWU national officials and reps who were busy enforcing Royal Mail’s dictates. After the CWU pushed through its sellout deal, the group announced a name change to Postal Workers Say No (PWSN), explaining their aims as follows: “We are not a genuine rank and file network much less movement yet, but aim to build for one”.

This “aim” cannot even be regarded as aspirational. PWSN’s July 27 statement outlined the group’s support for the bureaucracy in unmistakeable terms: “We will support all positive efforts by the union leaders eg [sic] organising drives to rebuild membership, but oppose them whenever they fail to defend workers interests or move against them.”

It stated that PWSN would also, “Expose backsliding from the deal” [!] adding, “We can critically support opposition candidates that gain members’ support by promising a more fighting policy (even if they called for a yes vote).”

Conclusion

The 2022-23 Royal Mail dispute was part of a developing wave of class struggle across the UK and worldwide driven by the deepest cost-of-living crisis in decades. Workers set out to defeat savage demands for corporate restructuring by shareholders and investors dictated by the capitalist market. All over the world, the working class is coming into head-on conflict with the bureaucracy of the trade unions, which have transformed over the past four decades from defensive organisations of the working class into arms of corporate management and the state.

The growth of corporatism in the trade unions was analysed by Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the Russian Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, more than 80 years ago. He wrote: “There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.” He explained, “Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of the trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class.”

Corporatism has since become fully entrenched in the trade unions of all countries; a process accelerated over the past four decades by the globalisation of capitalist production. Digital communications technology has enabled the capitalist class to scour the globe, locate production wherever labour costs are lowest and integrate the production process across national borders. The nationally based trade union and labour bureaucracies, defending capitalism as the source of their privileges, have responded by repudiating their old reformist programs, insisting that workers must accept the destruction of their wages, conditions and living standards so that the corporations can be “globally competitive.” Hence the CWU’s demand that postal workers “sacrifice” to save Royal Mail from bankruptcy, i.e., protect shareholder profit. No matter how much workers give up today, it will never be enough, as “the market” demands an increased return on investment each year. Failure to deliver is punished in the form of credit downgrades and the withdrawal of funds as billionaires like Daniel Kretinsky move vulture-like to find new sources of profit.

These facts of modern-day capitalism dictate the political tasks before the working class, showing the necessity for an international socialist strategy. The overthrow of the capitalist oligarchy and the reorganisation of global economy to meet human need not private profit is posed as an urgent task.

The determined, year-long battle at Royal Mail has provided an object lesson in the pro-capitalist politics of the pseudo-left. The SWP, SP and Workers Power emerged historically from petty-bourgeois tendencies which broke from Trotskyism and the Fourth International in the post-World War II period. Adapting themselves to the temporary stabilisation of capitalism, they rejected the struggle to build an international revolutionary party of the working class. All that could be accomplished, they insisted, was to place pressure in the existing Stalinist and reformist leaderships to fight for reforms, through strikes and other forms of protest.

The restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union, the abandonment of reformism by the Labour Party and their naked embrace of capitalism, and the corporatist degeneration of the trade unions has blown this perspective apart. It has seen the pseudo-left tendencies lurch ever further to the right in their role as the last line of defence for the bureaucracy.

The PWRFC and the IWA-RFC provides the vehicle for organizing the struggles of the working class and the political strategy this demands:

1)    Complete independence from the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party. Not the futile perspective of stiffening the spine of Ward and company, but the building of an insurgent movement of the rank-and-file to break their stranglehold and drive them from office.

2)    For an international struggle by the working class against the common enemy. Instead of a fratricidal contest over who will sacrifice most in the interest of the corporations and shareholders, unity with all workers throughout the UK and internationally who are fighting in defence of their jobs, wages and conditions.

To take this fight forward means building a new socialist leadership in the working class. This is the most important lesson from the struggle at Royal Mail.

 Labour MP Darren Jones congratulating the CWU on Twitter over its rotten pro-company deal [Photo: screenshot: Darren Jones/Twitter]

Royal Mail workers confronted a political struggle from the start against a Tory government rushing through essential services legislation to break the strike and a Labour opposition whose leader Sir Keir Starmer threatened to sack any shadow cabinet MP who visited a picket line. Their vicious response to the strike was part of efforts to suppress a growing strike wave they feared could bring down the government, jeopardising NATO’s proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia. In October, with Truss’s premiership in meltdown, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was summoned to the White House for urgent discussions that were later described as “beyond belief”.

If thousands of Royal Mail workers were blindsided by Ward’s betrayal of the strike, this was above all the responsibility of the Socialist Party, SWP and similar petty-bourgeois groups which built him up for years as a “left”. After Ward became general secretary in 2015, defeating incumbent Billy Hayes, the SP urged delegates to the CWU’s conference to “let Ward know they expect him to deliver on the more assertive stance that his election campaign indicated.” Despite Ward having worked with Hayes to ensure smooth passage of Royal Mail’s privatisation in 2013, the SP wrote, “Socialists in the union should demand that Dave Ward campaigns on the union’s progressive policies and gives members and reps the confidence to stand up to management.”

The backing of Ward by Britain’s pseudo-left was consolidated through their joint support for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who spent his five years in power suppressing the class struggle and capitulating to the Blairites on every front.

In 2016, SWP National Secretary Charlie Kimber interviewed Ward in Socialist Worker under the headline, “CWU leader Dave Ward says, ‘We need a strategy to beat the Tories’”. Kimber gushed, “Like us, you’ve been enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn’s election”. Ward responded by saying Labour had to be “prepared to say it will shift wealth to workers.” But he cautioned, “we have to be patient. If Corbyn is elected saying he will renationalise three industries and he manages one, that’s still an improvement, still a success.” Kimber then politely alluded to “the difficulties Corbyn is facing over an issue like Trident,” i.e., the Parliamentary Labour Party’s insistence that Trident nuclear weapons would remain Labour policy. Ward replied, “I think saying we’re all against nuclear weapons is the wrong starting point.” Ward’s de facto endorsement of nuclear weapons passed without comment by the SWP. Corbyn retained support for Trident—alongside NATO—in Labour’s election manifesto.

Socialist Party

Aside from the Morning Star, published by the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, the most naked defender of Ward and Furey during the dispute was the Socialist Party. With thousands of postal workers denouncing the CWU’s surrender document, the SP was plunged into crisis. It was a full five days before the SP could bring itself to comment on one of the most savage betrayals by the union bureaucracy in recent history.

On April 26, a statement by “Socialist Party members in the CWU” appeared in The Socialist. It claimed the negotiators’ agreement had “forced Royal Mail back on a number of issues”, before noting regretfully that this was “not enough” and calling for a “no” vote by members. The SP claimed the agreement was the outcome of “anti-trade union management, hell-bent on smashing our union”. This was a political cover for the CWU national executive, which co-authored the agreement with Royal Mail’s board. The SP portrayed the bureaucracy’s actions as a “mistake” which could be rectified through friendly advice: “The CWU leadership was unprepared for the type of battle this has turned into… The union’s leadership should have prepared, through discussion at all levels of the union, for escalating action.”

While the CWU executive was being denounced by workers as company stooges, the SP was calling on the executive to fight for Royal Mail’s renationalisation, “particularly when CEO Simon Thompson and co threatened administration.” But it was Ward and Furey threatening financial “Armageddon” against CWU members if they failed to endorse the union-company agreement. The SP’s absurd appeals served definite political ends, subordinating the working class to the Labour Party and to the Sunak government. It even suggested that both Starmer and the Tories could be pressured to oppose Royal Mail’s attacks: “The CWU leadership should have demanded that Keir Starmer publicly commit to the policy passed at last autumn’s Labour Party conference, of taking Royal Mail back into public ownership. That could have put real pressure on Sunak’s Tory government who have backed Royal Mail bosses.”

“When the representatives of the opposition raised the hue and cry that the ‘leadership is bankrupt,’ ‘the prognoses did not turn out to be correct,’ ‘the events caught us unawares,’ ‘it is necessary to change our slogans,’ all this without the slightest effort to think the questions through seriously, they appeared fundamentally as party defeatists.”

Leon Trotsky

“Trotsky’s assassination ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the 20th century, with far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world socialist movement. And yet, for decades, the circumstances surrounding the assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.”

Duncan Hallas, along with Tony Cliff and 30 others, was a founder-member in the 1950s of a small, anti-Trotskyist political group, which was the forerunner of the current Socialist Workers’ Party (Britain),

This book, published some twenty years after his death, contains a selection of his writings freely available on the Marxist Internet Archive[1] and includes sections written by others about Hallas and his ideas.

Hallas was well thought of inside the SWP. Alex Callinicos wrote in an obituary: “Not for Duncan the abstractions and obscurities of academic Marxism. He wrote plain English, punctuated by short, pithy sentences.” And Paul Foot said, “He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.”

Given Hallas’s popularity, it is perhaps a little perplexing why the SWP waited twenty years to publish this book. The clue may be that it contains many attacks on the Socialist Labour League, the British section of The International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI). It would not have gone unnoticed inside the SWP that today the ICFI, through its publication The World Socialist Website(wsws.org), has undergone a massive increase in its influence and is, by far, the most widely read Marxist-socialist internet-based publication worldwide. The total number of WSWS pages viewed in 2022 was 25,995,248. During the first month of this new year, the World Socialist Web Site recorded 1,882,673 page views.

If Hallas were alive today, he undoubtedly would have authored an attack on the ICFI as he did on previous occasions. Unlike many in the SWP, Hallas was unafraid to get his hands dirty and wrote several unprincipled attacks on the ICFI, particularly the Socialist Labour League. Many of these articles were written not only during an upsurge in the working class but saw an increase in the influence of the Trotskyist movement worldwide.

Hallas’s first attack on the Socialist Labour League came in 1969. His article was called Building the Leadership -“Orthodox Trotskyism” and the Political Roots of the Socialist Labour League[2].

He writes, “ The Socialist Labour League (SLL) is noted on the British Left for the activism of its members and its sharp hostility to all other political organisations. The sectarianism of the League (for example, its refusal to participate in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) and the lengthy polemics carried by its press against more or less obscure “revisionists” are well known. So are the complaints of ex-members of the organisation’s allegedly bureaucratic and authoritarian internal regime. But the most characteristic features are the extreme emphasis the SLL places on the twin themes of “leadership” and “betrayal” together with constant predictions of the imminence of catastrophic economic crisis. The SLL claims to be the embodiment of “orthodox Trotskyism”. The claim has considerable justification. The League’s present policies are rooted in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International. Its errors arise from the attempt to apply this analysis to a world situation in which it is irrelevant or false.”

Hallas’s article contains nothing new. It is a rehash of old Stalinist lies under a pseudo-left guise. Hallas inadvertently shows the SWP up for what it is an anti-Marxist and anti-Trotskyist organisation that is wedded to the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy. The article attacks every basic Marxist concept Leon Trotsky fought for, from the Transitional Programme and the Permanent Revolution to the class nature of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s designation of the first worker’s state as a Degenerated Workers’ State was rejected, and in its place was Tony Cliff’s State capitalism theory which Hallas completely agreed with.

Trotsky opposed the conception that the USSR represented a variety of “state capitalism” or a ruling class of a new type. He wrote, “The class has an exceptionally important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of national income alone but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundations of society. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule”.[3]

As an article by the Marxist writer Peter Daniels points out, Cliff’s theory was hardly original,  “Cliff developed his version of the theory of Soviet state capitalism in 1948. He added little to the arguments made in favour of the theory years earlier. As far as Cliff was concerned, the destruction of the Soviets and the loss of political power by the working class meant that the ruling bureaucracy, presiding over the rapid industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan, had been transformed into a ruling class of state capitalists. As we discussed briefly, Trotsky had answered these arguments many years earlier. Cliff never explained how the ruling caste, with no right of inheritance and no special property relations, had become a ruling class. Cliff’s abandonment of the theory of the degenerated workers’ state had a definite political significance. It represented a capitulation to the ideological and political pressure of “democratic” capitalism in response to the difficulties faced by the revolutionary movement.

Just as Shachtman had adapted to the moods among petty-bourgeois intellectuals at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Cliff and his supporters adapted to the pressures of the Cold War. Quite simply, they found it too difficult and uncomfortable to defend Marxism in the face of the anti-Communist campaign of this period. Only the genuine Trotskyists were able, as Cannon put it so well in The Open Letter, to fight imperialism without capitulating to Stalinism and to fight Stalinism, in the final analysis, a petty bourgeois agency of imperialism, without capitulating to imperialism.”[4]

As was said earlier, Hallas completely agreed with Cliff’s attack on Leon Trotsky. Hallas‘s book Trotsky’s Marxism 1979 further elaborates the SWP’s bitter hostility towards Trotsky and the very founding of the Fourth International.

Hallas’s book contains so many attacks on Trotsky and Trotskyism it is hard to know where to begin. As Daniels writes, “One could not ask for a more explicit repudiation of Marxism. His outlook sums up the “tactical opportunism” of the state capitalists. Seeking to root themselves in the British working class based on partial demands, not an international program, is how they have functioned all these decades. “Rank-and-files” and collaboration with the bureaucracy in the trade unions; single-issue middle-class protest as in their Anti-Nazi League of the 1970s and 1980s; collaboration today with Tommy Sheridan and Scottish nationalism, and with George Galloway in the Respect electoral coalition”.

While it is impossible to cover every rotten attack by Hallas mentioned in the book and elsewhere, it would be amiss of me not to highlight and oppose the scurrilous attack made by Hallas and the SWP on the ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International investigation. In an article published in 1985 entitled Workers Revolutionary Party Cult comes a cropper[5]. Hallas writes, “The loving up to various dictators in the Middle East, the ‘imminent danger of Bonapartist police dictatorship in Britain, the grotesque Security and the Fourth International campaign – aimed at the now deceased Joseph Hansen and the SWP US.

In 1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International launched the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination. This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, exposed the network of GPU and American intelligence agents within the Fourth International that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life and facilitated state surveillance in the following decades. The investigation was bitterly opposed by Pabloite and pseudo-left organisations, like the Socialist Workers PartyUK, which denounced the exposure of spies inside the Trotskyist movement as “agent-baiting.” This has remained their position, even though state intelligence documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirmed the findings of the International Committee and vindicated Security and the Fourth International.[6]

Indomitable Revolutionary by Duncan Hallas is not only a worthless book. It contains numerous attacks not just on Leon Trotsky but on the heritage of Trotskyism, in Britain and worldwide. Therefore, I have included a list of books that should be consulted when examining the heritage we defend.

Further Reading

The Heritage We Defend: Contribution to the History of the Fourth International Paperback – 1 Dec. 1988 by David North

Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century-David North

The Revolution Betrayed-Leon Trotsky

Security and the Fourth International-ICFI-Mehring Books

Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement-Eric London

How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism-1973 — 1985 -Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International

---

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/index.htm

[2] International Socialism (1st series), No.40, October/November 1969, pp.25-32. Marxists’ Internet Archive.

[3] The Class Natureof the Soviet State (October 1, 1933)- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm

[4] The Revolution Betrayed and the fate of the Soviet Union

Peter Daniels- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/rev1-f25.html

[5]From Socialist Review, No. 82, December 1985, p. 25.

Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/icfiCategory/security

The blog reached a significant milestone last month, registering over 8000-page hits. The previous six months have seen a general rise in interest in the blog And the website. The end of the year should see the overall total of hits during the lifetime of the blog reach around half a million.

Projects Old and New

Although I will continue to write articles for the blog/website, during my holiday, I will be looking at reworking previous unfinished projects. The first update is a master’s dissertation, Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates 1647. Secondly, work to complete the Raphael Samuel Book. Thirdly a new edition of my Why I Write a book with increased contributors. Lastly, to start research for a short biography of the historian Christopher Hill. All these books/projects will be self-published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing because no self-respecting publisher has ever published anything by an orthodox Marxist.

New Books

The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1-3 Hardcover

Maimonides: Faith in Reason (Jewish Lives) Hardcover – 6 May 2023 Manguel  Alberto

Osip Mandelstam a new biography-Ralph Dutii

Island Brigaders Liam Turbett

The Invention of Marxism-C Morina

The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920-A Nowak

 Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century-David North

New Articles

The next article for my website will be a review of the book Indomitable Revolutionary: Duncan Hallas, A Tribute By Dave Sherry, Jack Robertson, Sheila McGregor, Laura Miles, Alex Callinicos, John Rudge   Price: £12.00

A polemic commenting on the BBC Magazine article on Is History History. ( See- American Historical Association president issues grovelling apology after racialist social media attack-Tom Mackaman) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/24/ogzj-a24.html

  Other Media

An interview with economic historian Stephen Wheatcroft on the Soviet famine and historical falsification- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/10/qutp-j10.html

New Left Review July-August-Eric Hobsbawm Society New and Old

 

“I got to Marx from Hegel and Kant. A lot of people asked, ‘How could you be interested in Marx, given your family background?’ My mother was completely obsessed with worry . . . But for me, it was hard to say, ‘I’m turning back because my family wouldn’t like this.’ I wanted to explore these ideas. For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy, in a way.”

Lea Ypi

“One of the things people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare Socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But you are not comparing like for like.”

Lea Ypi

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the sheer volume of praise and recommendations before one has even read a word, four pages, to be precise. Either this is the work of a budding genius, or quite a few people have lost their intellectual sanity.

The second thing about the book is the title- Free—Coming of Age at the End of History. A cursory look inside the book will tell you that this is not a philosophical memoir. It is barely a political memoir. The title alludes to the neoliberal champion Francis Fukuyama. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History uses a loose version of Hegel’s idealist phenomenology. Fukuyama announced that the tired march of history had arrived at its final station—a US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market. This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics, always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning side of history. Whether Ypi, now a political philosophy professor at LSE in London, believes this is the “End of History” as we know it remains to be seen.

She has, however, become a darling of the petty-bourgeois left. The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP) believes she is an “avowed Marxist. In the review by Gareth Jenkins, he writes, “If you believed in ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ during the Cold War, what’s not to like about Lea Ypi’s autobiography? “.

The SWP professes to be a Marxist organisation. Still, one wonders how many of its members have been taken to lunch at an expensive restaurant by the Financial Times, the leading financial organ of the British bourgeoisie, or had a whole-page interview as Lea Ypi was given in the same newspaper.

The book is not without merit. It is well-written and shows what life was like growing up in Stalinist Albania. The book is written through the eyes of a young person growing up trying to make sense of the world around her. At one point, she writes, “I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.”  However, this “avowed Marxist” has little or no understanding of the complex phenomena of Stalinism, How it arose and how to combat it. I doubt also she has read any of the works of Leon Trotsky. While criticising her former society for contradicting the Marxist idea of freedom, she opposes the conception of Socialism if “brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, and the right combination of theory and practice”, would succeed.

Any reader looking for a worked-out revolutionary solution to mankind’s problems should perhaps give this book a miss. Her course at the London School of Economics starts with the premise that “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, and how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.”

The goal of human freedom and a free society, which many great revolutionary thinkers wanted, cannot be achieved by having some vague notion of behaving better or having a mild critique of capitalism and then hoping for the best. It can only be completed in the words of  Nick Beams, “if the tyranny of global capital and its rule through the “free market” is overturned. It must be replaced by a social system in which the productive forces, created by the intellectual and physical labour of working people the world over, are harnessed by them to meet their needs”.

Fri, 21 Jul at 19:35

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

It is interesting that Gardiner anticipated Everritt’s argument about the insularity of county communities. Both historians raise issues that not only deserve serious consideration but have received considerable attention since the 1970s. On common sense grounds we might expect that members of a predominantly agricultural society, in which wealth and social position derived primarily from ownership of land, and in which travel was also much slower and more difficult than today, to adopt a localist outlook. And if their participation in governance took place within the framework of a county, and their social alliances also tended to remain county-centered (as Everitt claimed to demonstrate), that would further reinforce their localism. The issue is how far these assumptions were actually true, and to the extent that they were not true, what features of early modern society broke through the insularity? Post 1970s historiography offers a number of answers, beginning with the stress of Clive Holmes and others on the importance of the centralized legal structure of English government, which made it impossible to ignore the political center entirely, and extending to the work of a number of scholars on printed controversy, the circulation and packaging of news, and the putative emergence of a ‘post-reformation public sphere’. We might add other facets of early Stuart society that arguably have not received enough attention: the role of great nobles and their affinities, whose horizons transcended county boundaries; the importance of professional groups like lawyers and clergymen — but arguably also clothiers, sailors and even peddlars, whose work brought them into contact with wider environments; the importance of London and other trading cities as hubs of information and nodal points of wider networks. While acknowledging the undoubted contributions of Gardiner and Everitt, we need to recognize that in important ways the discussion of the issues their work raises has moved on since the 1970s. What we now need to evaluate is how far these newer layers of historiography provide convincing answers to our questions about the reputed insularity of local communities, how they may still be lacking, and what new questions and avenues of research we ought to be pursuing.

Christopher Thompson

5 days ago

This is a very interesting and challenging comment, Malcolm. In the late-1960s, I took the view that a revised account of the Court-Country scheme of analysis was needed. One could look at the Court (a) as the centre of policy making in secular and religious matters (b) as the administrative apparatus stretching out from Westminster to the counties, corporations and localities of England and Wales and (c) as a cultural and social institution. Those who were involved with the Court in one of these senses might have been opposed to it or critical of it in another. It seemed to me then that this might avoid some of the analytical difficulties arising from the work of Trevor-Roper, Stone, Zagorin and others. I still think this approach has some utility. Within local communities, there was a range of responses to the demands of the ‘political Court’ which involved bargaining and negotiation, complaint, conflict and compromise. Conrad Russell was mistaken in supposing that Parliament was alone in its involvement in these relationships between successive monarchs and the Court on the one hand and the Country, including local communities, on the other. As Caroline rule became more authoritarian, opportunities for bargaining and negotiation narrowed by 1640. Clive Holmes, whom I first met in 1966 or 1967, was actually heavily influenced at that time by Everitt’s approach although, by c.1980, he was much more critical. News was clearly conveyed across the country not just by newsletter writers but by other means as well, including oral transmissions as the cases in many Assize Court and Quarter Sessions’ cases show. London as the major urban centre in the country clearly differed in its social composition and reactions to royal policies from many other localities. Obviously, the areas of historical enquiry have altered greatly since 1884 or 1967. But I was surprised to see how far Gardiner almost one hundred and forty years ago had anticipated what Everitt was to claim. These issues need further consideration. (My piece does not seem to have been reproduced as I uploaded it.)

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

I agree that the court-country thesis needed more careful parsing and analysis. In addition to your comments, which I find persuasive, I’ve also stressed the distinction between the actual court and the court as an image or cultural trope, which figured in contemporary polemic but which also did not correspond to actual conditions in any simple manner. One of the glaring problems with Stone’s account was his failure to make this distinction. I’d also add (and suspect you would agree) that ‘country’ opposition to higher taxation was not perfectly aligned with ‘puritan’ resistance to Laudian innovations and unhappiness with the absence of a more active policy in support of Protestant interests in Europe. If anything, ‘country’ desire for a cheaper and less intrusive court was implicitly at odds with the European ambitions of people like Warwick (and many of the Scottish Covenanters, for that matter). And in terms of personnel, we need to keep reminding ourselves that the groom of the stole and two successive lord chamberlains backed Parliament in 1641-2: the court was as divided as many counties. Indeed the fact that the court was internally divided, with many of its key members convinced that Charles needed to be forced to change course, was crucial to the strategy of the parliamentary leadership in the early months of the Lond Parliament. They did not want to replace the court but hoped instead to take it over, and thereby to hem Charles in to a point at which he would have no choice but to conform to their demands; and for a time they appeared to be succeeding. Seeing the Civil War as the outcome of a binary contest between the king, court and reactionary aristocracy and a gentry, puritan, country opposition leads to all kinds of distortions.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

I do agree, particularly on the point you make about the role of the ‘Court’ and the distinction to be made with its image. Hexter made the comment many years ago that opposition to royal policies in the State did not necessarily align with opposition to royal/Laudian policies in the Church. But gaining control of the direction of policies in Church and State could only be done by reducing the role of Charles I to that of a Doge of Venice, something the King would and could never accept. The peerage was by no means reactionary in my view but had benefited from a notable strengthening of its economic position since the 1580s – here I prefer W.R.Emerson’s analysis – a point that Lawrence Stone’s incidental comments in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 actually appear to support. The recent research on the subject of neutralism and coat-turning in the Civil Wars of the 1640s does confirm your observations.

 R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

I think we are in substantial agreement. Part of the problem in 1641 was that the only way to control Charles was to hem him in completely, isolating him from anyone who might encourage and help carry out an effort to re-assert his total control and punish his enemies. (It’s tempting to compare him to Donald Trump in this way, even if Charles was a far more cultivated man on a personal level). To do that, in turn, required ruthless tactics to eliminate or intimidate strong royalists, including the use or threat of impeachment and the encouragement of crowd actions that implied a physical threat to the safety of the royal family. This in turn provoked a backlash that extended even to some people initially supportive of the Long Parliament’s agenda, while lessening inhibitions against the use of equally ruthless tactics by the king’s partisans. That created a dynamic that corroded, even if it never entirely eliminated, commitment to the rule of law, non-violent forms of governance and civic peace, while empowering men on both sides who were prepared to mobilize and use coercive force. On one level this was a new version of the old problem of how to control an unacceptable king without creating even worse problems and more chaos than his misrule had produced. Parliament’s leaders tried to erect institutional and legal safeguards, in ways that went far beyond any of the baronial rebellions of the Middle Ages. But these failed to prevent a ruthless political contest that ultimately had to be decided by the sword, and that ultimately destroyed the existing system of English governance, including the role of Parliament, producing a military state lacking in any sense of legitimacy beyond a shrinking cohort of its own followers. And then to the attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after 1660.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

This is undoubtedly correct. I have some suspicions that the deployment of mob violence against supporters of the King, the Bishops and recalcitrant supporters of the royal regime in London was rather less spontaneous than Manning or later Marxists supposed. Valerie Pearl did not thinks so and there is a body of evidence to show that the ‘great contrivers’ were better acquainted with more radical Londoners than usually supposed. The major figures in the Long Parliament knew, pace Kishlanky, that Charles I was untrustworthy and would not keep to any settlement that might have been reached. In due course, the violence of the Civil Wars and Irish/Scottish imbroglios led to an outcome in which the post-1646 regimes rested in the last resort on force and lacked the degree of consent necessary to consolidate their rule. This problem was never resolved and led in 1660 to the Restoration. The constitutional and religious problems exposed after 1640 took several more decades to resolve.

R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

Yes, the parliamentary grandees sought to use crowd actions and threats of crowd violence as weapons to intimidate the king, queen and others. I strongly suspect they also hoped to ramp up or tramp down religious hostility to the queen to pressure her into pressuring Charles to acquiesce to their demands. But it must have been very hard to keep control of the crowds and religious passions once they had been unleashed. My reading is that some people — especially those involved in the First Army Plot — were initially inclined to advice Charles and HM to compromise but drew back when they concluded that the parliamentary leadership had unleashed mob violence it would be unable to restrain, leaving a royalist counter-strike as the only viable option. U developed this interpretation in my contribution to the collection on Royalists and Royalism edited by Jason McElligott and David Smith with CUP in 2007.

Christopher Thompson

2 days ago

I see the force of this argument and why the members/leaders of the Junto felt it necessary to use force to compel the King to make concessions that would have left him effectively powerless in a revised constitution. Whether they judged that Charles would ever have accepted such a settlement is another issue. Mobs could be mobilised and de-mobilised as some of the work on the French Revolution has shown. Your essay in the McElligott-Smith volume is an impressive analysis – I have been working on its immediate predecessor for some while.

R. Malcolm Smuts

19 hrs ago

I’ll be interested to see what you come up with. Up to a point mobs could be mobilised and demobilised, but they were also capable of taking on a life of their own (like armies), as contemporaries realized. I do wonder how far the ‘revised constitution (a term no one in the seventeenth century would have used) was considered an end in itself, rather than a set of improvised measures to deal with the problem of a wayward king. No doubt a bit of both. I’ve long felt that the traditional historiography on the outbreak of the Civil War over-emphasizes the reasoned pursuit of constitutional measures, while understating the degree to which contemporaries knew they had been drawn into a ruthless and dangerous political contest, in which their lives were often at stake, whose ultimate outcome was very hard to foresee because the measures needed to deal with the immediate crisis risked generating new crises down the road. The constitutionalist view makes the contest seem more polite and principled but also less fraught and exciting than it really was. Russell and Adamson have gone some way to redress the balance.

Christopher Thompson

7 hrs ago

Let me begin by commenting on how well connected the 2nd Earl of Warwick was with the leaders of the radical cause in London. Of its four M.P.s in the 1640s, Cradock and Venn were almost certainly known to him because of his and their role in founding the New England and Massachusetts Bay companies: Samuel Vassall held land of Warwick in south-east Essex and Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the people who supported Samuel Hartlib. Warwick’s brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645 and associate in the affairs of the Somers Island Company was Owen Rowe. Warwick had owned a house in Hackney until at least 1634 and did own one at Stoke Newington. His shipping interests gave him extensive contacts with the seamen of London before and after 1640. I suspect there are grounds for thinking that Warwick and his allies like Saye and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke had the contacts to concert demonstrations in and around Whitehall. All three men had been prepared in principle to support the use of armed resistance to royal authority since 1634 as their contacts with Connecticut and Massachusetts indicated. We can find expressions of deep hostility to royal and ecclesiastical authority in the works of Warwick’s clerical allies like Nathaniel Barnard and Jeremiah Burroughs well before 1640. They were, moreover, careful to cover their tracks in their dealings with Irish and Scottish opponents of the Caroline regime but left just enough traces elsewhere to offer indications of their plans. I am sorry to say that Conrad Russell’s analysis of the pre-1640 schemes of these men is fundamentally implausible and completely untenable. That their lives were on the line after the spring and summer of 1640 was, I would maintain, clear to them and their allies: they were well acquainted with King Charles I’s vindictiveness towards critics and opponents of his rule. As a result, they had to bind him so fast that he could never free himself from the restraints they aimed to impose on him as Pym’s remarks in the Plume Mss indicate.

R. Malcolm Smuts

1 hr ago

I find this entirely persuasive. These connections need more emphasis. Adamson’s book seems to me to do a better job than Russell’s in bringing out the role of the aristocratic opposition to Charles, but I’m sure there is more work to be done in this area. I’ve long thought — and I wonder if you would agree — that someone needs to bridge the perspectives of Adamson’s __Noble Revolt__ and Cressy’s __England on Edge__. I once said this to Cressy and he seemed to agree. Asking whether the revolt against Charles was popular or aristocratic in nature is the wrong question. It was obviously both at once and the challenge is to explain how the two dimensions were integrated. But I would also continue to maintain that no matter how extensive and effective the networks of Warwick and his allies undoubtedly were in mobilizing and steering popular protests, crowd actions were always inevitably difficult to control in the long run, and the process of tying a king’s hands was fraught with all sorts of risks, as earlier English history demonstrated in ways that people like Warwick would have appreciated. As I’m sure you know, Warwick told the Dutch envoys who accompanied William to London for his marriage with Princess Mary that he was too busy trying to prevent the outbreak of civil war to attend on them properly. He knew he was playing with fire, because he had no choice, but that didn’t make his actions any less dangerous. The return of soldiers from European campaigns to fight on both sides of the Bishops’ Wars compounded the problem.

Peter Paccione

4 days ago

It’s my impression that it was common throughout early modern England for people to refer to their counties as “countries.” It wasn’t unique to Kent.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

Yes but Everitt’s argument that this put Kent’s interests before those of England was not convincing then or now.

Fortunately, there is surviving evidence on Warwick’s ability to control very large crowds with a propensity to some violence. In the 1628 county election for Essex, about 15,000 freeholders assembled at Chelmsford (according to JohnPory) and returned the candidates Warwick supported despite the efforts of the Privy Council and the J.P.s of the county. If Pory was right about the numbers present, this would have represented about a quarter of all the adult men in Essex. In March, 1640 at the county election again in Chelmsford to the Short Parliament, it was clear a very large number of men were present and that threats of violence were made against the candidate or candidates endorsed by Lord Maynard, Henry Neville of Cressing Temple and probably by Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury. Sir William Masham’s very brief reported comments in the House of Commons suggest that Neville had had the support of the Privy Council and of the magistrates in an attempt to defeat Warwick’s allies. Warwick himself played a key role in managing the outcomes in both cases. It is likely that the supporters of his candidates were mobilised across Essex by his gentry allies, by his and their tenants, sympathetic clergymen and figures in the county’s boroughs. Warwick’s manor of Moulsham Hall was probably the base where these supporters were fed and watered. These outcomes hint at a degree of co-ordination across the county. The petition submitted to the Short Parliament from Essex in April, 1640 may have been signed then: that for Hertfordshire (and just conceivably the summary one from Northamptonshire) is clearly related. Later petitions from Essex to the Long Parliament were presented with a significant number of supporters brining them up. I have had some interesting conversations over the years with John Walter on how Warwick’s control of the county was exercised in the 1640s. It also seems likely to me that Warwick’s mercantile and clerical contacts were brought into play in the petitioning manoeuvres and demonstrations in 1641-1642 in the capital. He was undoubtedly aware of Charles I’s deep antagonism to critics and opponents of his authoritarian rule as the case of Sir John Eliot indicates. That Charles would take revenge if he could must have been obvious to the Junto from the summer of 1640 if not before. They had to tie his hands so firmly that that would never be possible as Pym’s recorded comment in the Plume Ms. notebook suggests. Warwick, Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke and their allies in the House of Commons and beyond were at risk of their lives as you rightly state. 

Several decades ago, Alan Everitt argued in his study of the county of Kent that its rulers formed a community of their own, that this community was distinct from that of other counties and that, when its leaders spoke of their ‘country’ they meant Kent rather than England. It was in reaction to the demands of the King and his Privy Council that the community of Kent shaped its political and religious responses and that this form of localism helped to explain the antecedents and outbreak of the English Civil War or Revolution.

There is no doubt about the stimulus that this hypothesis gave to the investigation of county histories across the period. The works of Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill and the late Clive Holmes testify to its impact. In historiographical terms, it was highly significant in the late-1960s and 1970s, even though its influence has now faded.

At that time, I was sceptical partly because this argument did not appear to have medieval antecedents and did not feature in the case of the counties I was then studying. What I had not appreciated was that, in some respects, Everitt’s argument had been anticipated by S.R.Gardiner in his volume on the History of England between 1639 and 1641. He had written there that, in 1639. Both Charles and Wentworth under-estimated the strength of the opposition against their policy too much, to make them even think of recurring to violence. Nor is it at all likely that even those who felt most bitterly against conscious the Government were aware of how strong was their position in the country. In the seventeenth century, when Parliament was not sitting, our ancestors were a divided people. Each county formed a separate community, in which the gentry discussed politics and compared grievances when they met at quarter sessions and assizes.

Between county and country, there was no such bond. No easy and rapid means of communication united York with London, and London with Exeter. No newspapers sped over the land, forming and echoing a national opinion from the Cheviots to the Land’s End. The men who begrudged the payment of ship-money in Buckinghamshire could only learn from uncertain rumour that it was equally unpopular in Essex or in Shropshire. There was therefore little of that mutual confidence which distinguishes an army of veterans from an army of recruits, none of that sense of dependence upon trusted leaders which gives unity of purpose and calm reliance to an eager and expectant nation.

Gardiner’s claim anticipated the arguments that Everitt was to put seven decades later. I am not sure that either was correct. Similar demands were made of each county from the ‘political Court’ at the centre and were the subject of bargaining and negotiation, of compromise and conflict. These common experiences were felt across England and Wales. Newsletter writers like Mede, Pory and Rossingham made them widely known as the testimonies of men like John Rous and Walter Yonge showed. The carriers of goods and people conveyed news more widely than Gardiner appreciated in this passage.

When I was a postgraduate, I was often doubtful about the analysis of the past in the works of previous generations of historians. Since then, I have come to understand how perceptive they often were and that important insights remain to be found in their works. Gardiner and Everitt may not have been precisely right in their conclusions but it is striking how similar their formulations were. I shall go on reading the works of previous historians in the hope of gaining better insights into the lives of early modern people in the future.

16 July, 2023

 “In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way.”

All the Lovers in the Night

‘I want to write about real people,’

Mieko Kawakami

“There are just as many memories as there are people, so there’s no correct version of one event. That’s why we need many different kinds of voices and experiences, and by reading those voices, we understand and construct a bigger picture of the world.”

Mieko Kawakami.

“Those Who Fight Most Energetically and Persistently for the New Are Those Who Suffer Most from the Old”

Leon Trotsky

All the Lovers In the Night is Mieko Kawakami’s third novel. The book covers similar ground to her previous books, ” Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. All three books were translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, with Breasts and Eggs having sold over 250,000 copies in thirty countries. Kawakami’s novels have come under sustained criticism from Japanese conservatives,  Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former governor and a former novelist, called them “unpleasant and intolerable”.

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important writers to come out of Japan. Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her family were working class and poor. She was forced to work in a factory at the age of making heaters and electric fans. Later she had a job as a hostess and a singing career, finally becoming a blogger and a poet. She has almost single-handily dragged Japanese literature into the 21st century. She won many awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, in 2008. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important Japanese novelists, praised the writer, saying Kawakami  is “always ceaselessly growing and evolving.” However, Kawakami has not always liked  Murakami’s portrayal of women.[1] In a 2017 interview with Murakami, she opposed his perceived sexism, saying, “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function” and “Women are no longer content to shut up,”

All the Lovers in the Night covers the life of a working-class Japanese girl, Fuyuko Irie, a proofreader in Tokyo. Fuyuko is a typical character used by Kawakami, a person who is single, childless, largely a loner and travels through life unnoticed and unloved.

As Fuyuko Irie says, “What I saw in the reflection was myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at the age of thirty-four. Just a miserable woman who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on her own in the city, desperately hugging a bag full to bursting with the kind of things that other people wave off or throw in the trash the first chance they get.”

There is cleverness in how “All the Lovers in the Night” addresses all the changes in the book’s main protagonists. Kawakami never judges her characters and empathises with them/. As Joshua Krook writes, “If there is a core question in Kawakami’s work, it is what the oppressed should do to feel okay with themselves. Most of her stories feature people who are ignored or mistreated by society, with many having psychological problems stemming from their mistreatment. The protagonists cling onto one or two people as lifelines that keep them afloat in the storm.”[2]

Kawakami’s Treatment of Irie’s alcoholism is particularly sensitive. Alcoholism seems to be a major problem in Japanese society. Just typing in Google search engine for alcoholism amongst young Japanese women brings up many articles.

A recent study found that “young Japanese people drink much more alcohol than the global average. In 2020, 73 per cent of men aged 15 to 39 in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol compared to 39 per cent of their male peers globally. The difference was even starker for Japanese women: 62 per cent of women aged 15 to 39 years in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020 compared to just 13 per cent of young women globally.”[3]

Kawakami is not shy about discussing subjects barely mentioned in Japanese or, come to that matter, in Western Society, such as social class and gender. Her treatment of sexual violence towards women is one such issue. As Cameron Bassindale writes in his book review, “It reaches a nadir in tone when Kawakami produces a chapter detailing sexual violence which is so visceral and believable it will leave those weak of temperament wondering why they ever picked up this book. That is to say, Kawakami has truly outdone herself, surpassing even her lofty expectations of creating a narrative which is immediate and realistic; this English translation is a gift to anyone wishing to understand life for the modern Japanese woman and the perils and hardships many women face. Of course, no two human experiences are the same, and that point is apparent in the contrast between the female characters in the novel; however, the space between men and women in the book tells the state of gender relations in Japan. It is up to the reader to draw their conclusions.”[4]

Several middle-class reviewers like Mia Levitan have sought to position Kawakami as some “literary feminist icon”. Levitan writes, “ Anti-heroines aching for erasure may point to a broader unease. Kyle Chayka, the author of The Longing For Less (2020), posits that a modern desire for nothingness stems from overstimulation. Or it may be a reaction to “girl-boss” feminism. “Instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our throats . . . I think feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is hard,” suggests Audrey Wollen, the Los Angeles-based artist who became known in 2014 for her “Sad Girl Theory”, which reframes sadness as a form of protest.”

A turn towards feminism cannot solve the problems women face in Kawakami’s books or in real life. The plight of working-class women in Japan or anywhere else is inseparably linked to the plight of the working class.

As Kate Randall correctly points out, “The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle.As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”[5]

All the Lovers in the Night is well-written, eminently readable, and sometimes beautiful. Although largely written about womanhood, it is still a great novel, and one looks forward to Kawakami’s future work.

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[1] A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself- https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/

[2] https://newintrigue.com/2021/06/18/the-writing-of-mieko-kawakami/

[3] Population-level risks of alcohol consumption by amount, geography, age, sex, and year: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2020- www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext

[4] bookmarks.reviews/reviewer/cameron-bassindale/

[5] The condition of working-class women on International Women’s Day=

 “The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labour, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand—as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boardinghouse—any control except that of education, habit and social opinion”.

Leon Trotsky

‘you gentlemen who think you have a mission

to teach us of the 7 deadly sins

should first sort out the basic food position

then do your preaching that’s where it begins’

(Brecht, Three Penny Opera)

This new edition of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which comes with a new translation,should be welcomed.

At the beginning of the 1870s, there were two main socialist parties in Germany. The Social Democratic Workers Party founded by Karl Marx’s collaborator, Wilhelm Liebknecht, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, and the General German Workers Association was founded by the late Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.

Marx’s criticism of Lassalle contained in Critique of the Gotha program was not episodic but was profound and had far-reaching significance for the German (and international) workers movement. Marx’s letters to Engels on the subject of Lassalle, and, for that matter, his direct correspondence with Lassalle, retain immense political and theoretical use.

According to a document of the founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany), “ the SPD was never a homogeneous party. The unification conference in 1875 in Gotha made numerous concessions to the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle, who had died in 1864. Marx sharply criticised the Gotha Programme, which he accused of being “tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. Lassalle had wanted to establish socialism with the help of the Prussian state, which he regarded as an institution standing above the classes. He had even met secretly with Bismarck in order to exploit the latter’s conflicts with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the working class. Lassalle justified this opportunist “alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie” (Marx) by saying that in relation to the working class, “all other classes are only one reactionary mass”. This ultra-left cliché blurred the difference between the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. It was also reproduced in the Gotha Programme and was angrily rejected by Marx”.

The Critique of the Gotha Program has, in some radical and academic circles, been seen as the Marxist movement finally showing what the future will look like under socialism. At best, this is a miss reading of the book or, worse, a silly deception.

As the Marxist economist Nick Beams points out, “The development of a socialist society will not occur according to a series of prescriptions and rules laid down by an individual, a political party or a governmental authority. Rather, it will develop based on the activity of the members of society who, for the first time in history, consciously regulate and control their social organisation as part of their daily lives, free from the domination and prescriptions of either the “free market” or a bureaucratic authority standing over and above them. In one of his earliest writings, Marx made clear that “only when man has recognised and organised his powers as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished” (Marx, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, Volume 3, p. 168).[1]

While this new translation of a Marxist classic is welcomed, it comes with a health warning. The politics of the organisation that produced it, to put it crudely, stink. The Marxist-Humanist Current was founded in the US by the State Capitalist Raya Dunayevskaya. Along with C L R, James Dunayevskaya, disagreed with Leon Trotsky’s definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his time in the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay, formed the Johnson-Forrest tendency that the Soviet Union represented a new form of “state capitalism” with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in his complete and open break with the Fourth International’s perspectives: “Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery.” [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950]. James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War. Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put the state capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for imperialism within the workers’ movement.

The Marxist Humanist Current has nothing to do with Marxism. It does not see the modern working class as revolutionary and has no interest in building a revolutionary party. The Current concentrates not on the working class but on the petty bourgeoisie.

As Peter Linebaugh states in his afterword, “We are at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift”’. His answer to mankind’s problems is to rely on a rising among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions that will “become components of ‘the real movement’ that conquers as well as resists: ‘We can pluck the living flower to re-create the commons.’

Ironically, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, while aimed at the Lassalelans of the 19^th century, could also be a scathing critique of their modern-day counterparts in the Marxist Humanist Current.  

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[1] Some questions and answers on life under socialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/corr-m30.html