An interview with Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! by David Walsh

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To compliment my Article on Elijah Wald’s book I have published this interview which first appeared on WSWS.org

Elijah Wald (born 1959) is a musician, journalist and music historian. He is the author of a number of books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2005), How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (2009), The Blues: A Very Short Introduction (2010) and Jelly Roll Blues–Censored Songs & Hidden Histories (2024). 
Elijah Wald 
His Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) is the work on which the recent film about Bob Dylan’s early days in music, A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), is loosely based. Wald also co-authored folk singer and musician Dave Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir, Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005). 
We spoke in January in a video call. 
*  *  *  *  * 
David Walsh: For the benefit of our readers, could you give us a sense of your own background and how you came to be interested in music, or play music, or listen to music? 
Elijah Wald: Sure. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which doesn’t hurt, particularly for the kind of music we’re talking about. 
The first concert I remember seeing in my life was a children’s concert when I was five years old by Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. That world was all around me. I was probably eight years old and saw Pete Seeger with the crew of the Sloop Clearwater. For me, it just was like, “Okay, that looks like more fun than what any of the other grownups were doing, I want to do that.” 
That was the plan. I read Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. I was going to be a rambling hobo folk singer. That was that, and basically that was how I planned my life for the next 20-plus years. 
I was lucky. I had a half-brother who played guitar. He was painfully shy about it, I never heard him play, but I did have his records. He had the complete country blues fan’s record collection circa 1965 or so. So I grew up on that as well. I had an uncle who had gone to school with [critic] Ralph Gleason and could get me free records from Fantasy Records, so I had a couple of things with Dave Van Ronk on them. 
I saw that Van Ronk was going to be playing in Boston. My mom took me to the concert, I think I was 13, and I was absolutely blown away. A week or so later, a young woman who was over at our house turned out to be a close friend of Dave’s, and she took me to meet him next time he played in Boston. I learned that he gave guitar lessons, and when it got time to go to college, I decided to go to New York University for one year so I could take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk—and then I would drop out and be a rambling folk singer, and that’s what I did. 
I actually went off to Europe where it was easier to be a rambling hobo folk singer than in the US. For the next 12 years basically, I went back and forth trying to make a living that way, and eventually started doing a little bit of writing for the Boston Globe. The years went by, and with every passing year, I was making more money from the writing and it was becoming clearer that I was not going to be able to make a living just playing music. 
I continued and continue to do both, but the writing eventually treated me better than the music did economically. 
I made a living full-time as a writer. I did some teaching, like a lot of writers. Basically, writing was the main income and the Bob Dylan book [Dylan Goes Electric!] is a perfect example. 
First time around, that book paid for two years of my life, second time with the movie, that paid for another two years of my life. That’s not normally how my books work, but that’s how Dylan books work. That’s why I did a Dylan book. I did not expect a movie, but I did the Dylan book specifically because my previous book had not sold well, and I needed to do a book that was going to sell. 
DW: Has it sold, besides being made into a movie? 
EW: Oh, yeah. How well the book sold to the public is another question. But it sold to a publisher instantly for three times as much as I’ve ever gotten for any of my other books. Dylan books, despite the fact that there are so many of them, are an easy sell. I think it’s because of the way the economics of the book industry work. Essentially, women are book buyers, and physical books—and this originally came out strictly as hardcover—are things people buy as gift items. Every white woman in America over the age of 40 knows a man who is a Dylan nut. 
This didn’t occur to me until I was going around doing signings and women kept coming up, buying the book and asking me to sign it to a male name. 
DW: Nonetheless, whatever its origins, you obviously took the assignment seriously because it’s an interesting, complicated book. 
EW: It’s actually a funny story. I got into that book because I’d written a book called How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll [2011], which is a history of popular music from 1890 to 1970 with a catchy title, so people will pick it up. But in February 2014, the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arriving in the US, some reporters who didn’t have any better ideas or who’d run out of other angles, were calling me up for Beatles stories. 
I thought, is there a 50th anniversary coming up that I could jump on? I thought of Dylan going electric in Newport. I figured, that’s been written about so much, I could just pull together a book. I’ll only have six months or so, but it’s all out there. I could just pull something together quick and dirty. 
Dylan Goes Electric! (2015) 
Then I started looking into it and realized that everything I had gone in thinking I knew was wildly oversimplified or simply wrong. It ended up being a very, very busy six months. It is a complicated story, and he’s not the only complicated person involved. 
I had originally imagined doing a sort of background of the folk scene, and then Dylan arrives, but I realized it would work better as a narrative if I made Pete Seeger stand for the entire folk scene, which he reasonably was in that moment. 
As of 1960, whatever you meant by the folk scene, you meant some kind of Pete Seeger music. And that, for me, became the heart of the project, because I think the way a lot of people see that story is Pete was the open, simple guy, and in comes this complicated, difficult guy who’s Bob Dylan—and there was no one on earth more complicated than Pete Seeger. 
So it became the whole story of these two very complicated, very guarded, I think very shy, and in their separate ways, extraordinarily talented and influential figures, who came together and split apart. 
DW: When did you become aware of Bob Dylan?  
EW: Ha. I can tell you almost exactly. My father brought back Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits [1967]. My father [scientist George Wald] was a professor, very active in the anti-war movement and very interested in being in tune with his students. So he picked up Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits because he wanted to know who this guy was. 
I had this little four-speed record player up in my room, but my parents wouldn’t let me play their LPs on it. But I inherited my grandparents’ 78 albums, and therefore my records were the basic Jewish Communist record collection circa 1944. So I had the Almanac Singers, the Union Boys, Leadbelly, Josh White, Paul Robeson and the Spanish Civil War songs and the Red Army Chorus. 
I didn’t much like the Red Army Chorus, but all the rest of those I listened to assiduously. I may be the youngest person on the planet who was a Woody Guthrie nut before I heard Bob Dylan. In any case, my father brought home the Greatest Hits, and he put on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” 
I said, he’s a terrible singer. My father said, but he sounds like Woody Guthrie. I said, he doesn’t sound anything like Woody Guthrie, which by that time in his career was true. So that’s when I first heard Dylan. Like a lot of people, sort of like the people who booed when he went electric at Newport, I got over that first reaction and was a hardcore fan certainly within weeks, if not within days. 
DW: What were the myths or unresolved questions you wanted to address, or that you came across, in writing your Dylan book? 
EW: There were a couple of key things I didn’t understand. The central thing was I went in like everybody else thinking about Dylan as a songwriter, and it rather quickly struck me that the story of Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965 is not at all about songwriting. 
That’s a story about Dylan as a musician and performer. Everybody traces Dylan in terms of the background that leads to his becoming a songwriter, and how he develops as a songwriter. If you simply put that aside and try to trace his musical evolution, it’s a very, very different picture. He starts out playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band in high school, he gets into folk music, specifically through black folk singers. 
I know a number of black musicians who got into folk music following Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Leon Bibb. That was not an unusual path for any young black singer who reached folk music at all, the few who did in that moment. But I know of no other white performer who came in by that route. 
The story is that Dylan showed up in New York because of Woody Guthrie. That’s partly true, but not because he wanted to play like Woody Guthrie or write like Woody Guthrie. The key Woody Guthrie addiction for him, as it was for me, was reading Bound for Glory and wanting to be Woody Guthrie. Being Woody Guthrie was a completely different exercise. 
In the earliest interview with Dylan, when someone, in fact, Izzy Young [of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village], described him as playing folk music, Dylan said, I don’t even know what that means. I play old jazz tunes, pop 40 stuff, cowboy songs. People have to call it something, so they call it folk music. He meant that. He was being Woody Guthrie, who likewise played whatever was on the jukebox and old blues songs. And, yes, Dylan also wrote some stuff, and he rather quickly met up with Dave Van Ronk, and blues really became what he did. 
The first album [Bob Dylan, 1962] is heavily blues-influenced, but the second album that never got issued, which he was recording before he made the left turn into The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan [1963] was a blues album, part acoustic, part electric. If you think about the fact that he was recording electric blues back in ‘61-62, that completely changes the story of his finally making that music three or four years later. 
Bob Dylan (1962) 
He basically made a brief left turn into writing the sort of songs that Albert Grossman could hand to Peter, Paul and Mary and get top 40 hits. But most of us came to him via Peter, Paul and Mary and Blowin’ in the Wind [1962] and thought of him as the guy who writes those pretty folk songs, and he never was that guy, except for two years in the middle there. 
DW: Van Ronk thought of himself as a jazz musician. Why did the music suddenly become channeled through this genre called folk music? 
EW: First of all, because it was happening. Second of all, because you didn’t have to hold a band together. You could just go out there by yourself with a guitar. Whatever kind of music you play, the money is lousy if you’re a relative unknown. Be it Van Ronk with jazz, where you would need to be probably five or six guys, or Dylan with rock ‘n’ roll, where you would need four or five guys, the money would be exactly the same as if you went out there by yourself with an acoustic guitar. So just economically, there were huge advantages to the folk scene. 
DW: But why was the folk scene going? That’s the question. 
EW: Largely, actually for the same reason, because it was cheap. Part of the answer is there are a bunch of different folk scenes. The world of the Tarriers, the Kingston Trio and all of that was happening because pop music had hit an impasse. 
You had, on the one hand, characters like Frank Sinatra essentially still doing the music of the 1940s. On the other hand, you had rock, which was dumb teenage music. If you were a college student in this environment and wanted your sound, basically your options were modern jazz, the baroque “early music” revival, which was happening in the same world, or folk music. 
Most people didn’t choose between them. Typically, if you went into a college dorm at that point, someone who had a Kingston Trio album was likely to also have some Bach or [Alfred] Deller Consort, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck definitely. Dave Brubeck and the Kingston Trio were in the same record collection. 
The way people think about genre is completely wrong. What we’re talking here is class. This is the middle class intelligentsia listening to Brubeck and the Kingston Trio. 
The left were the intellectuals, the intellectuals were listening to folk music. After the McCarthy era knocks out the first round of folkies, it doesn’t knock out that association of folk music being what the smart people are listening to. 
It’s one of the weird facts of life—I mention it in the Dylan book—that the Kingston Trio make their East Coast debut at [Greenwich Village jazz club] the Village Vanguard on a double bill with Thelonious Monk. 
In Greenwich Village there was another thing happening, which was the Beat coffeehouses with the poets, and in between the poets, they would stick on folk singers, frankly, because like the poets, they would work for virtually nothing. And they were around. By the early 60s, you had a huge audience of people from Omaha and so forth who had seen Bell, Book and Candle [1958 film set in Greenwich Village]. When they came to New York, they wanted to go to a Broadway show, go see the Statue of Liberty, and go down to the Village and see the weirdos. 
Dobie Gillis [a television situation comedy with a prominent “Beatnik” character] and Bell, Book and Candle. So there was this audience that was being bused in on weekends, and making the coffeehouses a going proposition, and they had to fill the stage with something. 
So, it’s poets and folk singers. It wasn’t particularly economically viable. Then the Kingston Trio got their hits, and then Albert Grossman had this brilliant idea of Peter, Paul and Mary. If you look at the first Peter, Paul and Mary album [1962], Peter and Paul look like members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, they have exactly the same beards and suits, and they’re standing against the same brick wall, and they have the beautiful blond between them, which is a nice addition. 
It was simply designed to be the collegiate sound of the moment. Grossman heard Bob Dylan’s songs and he went, “Perfect.” And there’s the package. It’s what the intelligent young English major is listening to. 
DW: Yes, but it seems to me at a certain point, something else comes up, something else bubbles up. There’s an audience … 
EW: There’s the civil rights movement. 
DW: There’s a hunger for something. 
Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) 
EW: There was a hunger for something, but that hunger was being sated in a lot of different ways. There was your roommate, if you were unlucky, or the guy next door, if you were slightly luckier, who couldn’t understand why you were listening to that stupid folk garbage, rather than Miles Davis! There were plenty of ways to be smart, right? When Dylan went electric, it gave people permission, in fact, to pull out the records they really enjoyed, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and to feel that that was just as grown up and intelligent, indeed more intelligent. 
DW: There was the desire obviously of a generation, or part of a generation, for what they perceived to be more authentic, less slick, less palatable and less commercial than Sinatra and Broadway musicals. 
EW: Pete Seeger clearly was part of that. And let’s remember that Joan Baez is the unbelievable breakthrough in this whole period. Because the Kingston Trio was fun and they had singles on the radio, but Joan Baez never has a hit single if we’re talking that early period, like ’60, ’61, ’62, she has no singles, no radio play. She puts out three albums, and I think if you look at the top one hundred selling albums in 1962, three of them are Joan Baez albums on a classical music label with no singles. 
Because she is the most uncommercial artist on the planet, and she really was. That’s one of the interesting things, unlike Bob Dylan, who wanted to be a rock star, Joan Baez really, truly was the character that she portrayed. 
There are many ways to define authenticity, but one is not wanting to be part of the pop music machine. Joan Baez, at every turn, when offered a chance to be part of that machine, refused, and yet became huge. There it gets gendered, because it was much, much more a female audience than a male audience who went with Baez, and also Peter, Paul and Mary. 
I think the authenticity thing you mention is absolutely real and very powerful, particularly in that moment where a lot of young people are profoundly disaffected with what was going on in the world around them. But there were a lot of ways to be a rebel, disaffected and looking for “the real thing.” 
You could go with hardcore rock ‘n’ roll. You could go Joan Baez. You could, as I said, go to jazz. You could go back to early music, which was bound up with that same concern for authenticity—no symphonies, no playing Bach on piano, it’s going to be harpsichord. 
I don’t think there’s any accident to the fact that the same record companies recording young musicians playing folk music authentically on banjos are also putting out Bach played authentically on harpsichord. Be it Vanguard [Records], be it Elektra, be it Folkways. The overlap of early music and the authentic end of the folk scene, I think there’s nothing accidental there at all. 
DW: I would argue there are relatively universal, objective qualities in music. There’s a reason why people are still listening to Bob Dylan in some cases, or, for that matter, Bach. 
EW: I don’t know if you actually want to go down this road, but if you do, no, I disagree completely. 
DW: Okay, well, let’s not then. In your book, you build up a picture of Bob Dylan’s development. 
I was struck by the fact that in high school, he was a would-be rock and roll musician. It seems that the Woody Guthrie interest came out of nowhere. You suggest that it was more a literary-lifestyle issue than a musical one, linked to his reading Bound for Glory. 
You point out as well that he was a sponge, that he picked up things enormously quickly, and that was a great strength. He could take on various personas quickly, and with a certain depth and with a certain understanding. 
It doesn’t seem to me that there was anything necessarily cynical about his radicalization for a few years. It happened to a good many people. He came and went more quickly than many others. 
EW: I think one thing that one needs to understand is that there are different kinds of radicals. There are people who come in who are willing to do the reading. There are people who come in because they are seeking a community. And there are people who come in because they are angry and want to break stuff, and this seems like a group that’s doing that. 
I think Dylan comes in, if he’s going to be found in one of those groups, definitely in group three. He comes in as James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause. The rebel part is absolutely real and deep and part of him, but the cause is transitory. 
Edward Norton and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown 
DW: It’s more intuitive and so forth, and you can feel that in his work. 
EW: To me, the brilliant political Dylan line is from Talkin’ New York. This is from his first album, recorded in late 1961, before he’s gotten political, before the Watts riots or anything like that: 
A lot of people don’t have much food on their table But they got a lot of forks ’n’ knives And they got to cut something. 
That’s a level of radicalism, in one sense, that the liberal left found completely unacceptable. In some ways it’s a more extreme radicalism than the civil rights movement, which he had not yet gotten into. That’s real. 
DW: Yes. It’s not a question of indicting him or wagging a finger, but I do think he lost something later on because he didn’t understand the source of some of his own strengths. 
I think the comment you have in the book by Seeger from 1967 was interesting: 
The left tried to lionize him; he reacted violently against this, saying fuck you to them all. He dressed outlandishly, screamed out new songs with electric backing; cynicism came to the foreground. 
My own sense of it is that he reacted with some legitimacy against the leftist folk music establishment. But I do think he threw the baby out with the bathwater, and that he convinced himself that the source of his music was his own genius. There are always currents that have made you what you are, and by throwing those out the window, to me he became less interesting. He was swept up in a certain radicalism for a few years, and then he decided that was not for him. 
EW: I think that’s not accurate. It was never that he was swept up in political radicalism. It was about the people around him. For a few years, he was hanging out in a world where all of his friends were engaged in that. 
It’s not that he had those beliefs for a while, and then he abandoned those beliefs. It’s that he was in that social group for a while, and then he moved to another social group. 
He always was rebelling against people telling him you’re this or you’re that. Once in a while, he would be with people and he would feel, hey, we’re all against the same stuff. But then he had a tendency to feel, no, I’m trapped here too, and go somewhere else. [Dylan’s girlfriend] Suze Rotolo said there was never a time when he was the sort of person who was burying himself in the newspapers. 
If you’re hanging out with Dave Van Ronk, your political analysis will be different than if you’re hanging out with the Rolling Stones. It won’t be more rebellious. But the way you’re channeling your rebellion will be completely different. 
DW: But you make certain choices about the people you hang out with. Look, there’s also the siren song of celebrity, of money. He wanted to be a rock and roll star. In any case, we’re not going to resolve these issues in this conversation. 
How did your relationship with Dave Van Ronk come about? How was that? 
EW: Everything I am, I was made by Van Ronk. That’s the brief, simple answer. I went to him when I was 17 years old. I’d already been sitting around with him when I was 15 and 16. My understanding of how the world works, my understanding of how music works, my understanding of how music works in the world, it’s all straight out of Dave.  
DW: How did he feel about his own career, or success or lack of success, do you think? 
Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters (1967) 
EW: It depended on the year. His overall view was that, given where he started from, he did better than anyone could have ever expected. There was a period in the second half of the 1960s when he saw a lot of less talented people grabbing the brass ring, and he kept grabbing for it and missing, and that was extremely frustrating. 
By the mid ’70s, he was extremely depressed. Then he pulled out of that and went back to, okay, compared to where I started, given my background, I’ve been able to live a reasonably middle class life without ever having to do a day’s work. Can’t argue with that. 
DW: Obviously, you can’t choose the circumstances under which you work. 
EW: He made a number of grabs at the brass ring. They could have worked. They didn’t.  
DW: I’ve never heard his rock ‘n’ roll music, is it good? 
EW: Depends what you mean by good. It was not designed to make him a rock star. Was it harmonically complex? Yes. Was some of it a lot of fun? Yes. Did it get the kids dancing? No. Did it make the charts? No. Was it one of his favorite albums till the day he died? Yes. 
If you held a gun to his head and said, we’re now going to listen to a Dave Van Ronk album from beginning to end, what would you like to hear? It was either going to be the Ragtime Jug Stompers [1964] or the Hudson Dusters [1967]. Because rather than sitting there listening to all his own mistakes and being annoyed, he could listen to all the cool things the other people on the record were doing and like it. 
DW: Did you ever play with him in public? 
EW: I never performed on stage with him. I arranged and played one of the tracks on his Bertolt Brecht album [Let No One Deceive You, 1992]. I just was in the right place at the right time. He suggested that I do something which he took for granted that I couldn’t do, and then I did it, so he was stuck. 
He was going to be recording in Vancouver. I said, hey, anything I could do on the album? He said, I’m going to Edmonton. I’ll be back in two weeks. If you can come up with an arrangement of “A Man is a Man,” I’d love to do that one. He had, I assume, felt like he had dealt with the subject at that point. But as it happened, when he got back in two weeks, I had actually done a pretty nice little arrangement. And so he was stuck. 
He was without question the best educated human being I have ever spent time with. There was virtually no subject he could not converse intelligently about with an incredible depth of knowledge. 
He was very realistic about his own skills. He thought he was better than a lot of people around him who were more successful than he was. At times he found that annoying, but he also understood that he was not in the same class as people like Louis Armstrong or Sarah Vaughan, and was not at all bothered. 
What bothered him was the Peter, Paul and Marys of the world becoming superstars. George Benson becoming a superstar didn’t bother him at all, you know. 
DW: Did you have anything to do with the making of A Complete Unknown? 
EW: No, they bought Dylan Goes Electric! and that was it. In fact, it was Dylan’s people who bought the book. They were behind this whole project. I had no idea he’d actually read it, but apparently Dylan read it and liked it. I think that speaks to how much of the book is about Seeger and other things around him, rather than about him. 
DW: Yes, but I think it’s to his credit. As we know, artists are often very petty about those things. It’s to his credit that he has that degree of objectivity. 
EW: I’m assuming he liked it because it contextualized things.  
DW: I don’t agree with everything in the book, and we obviously don’t see eye to eye on certain things. But I think the book presents an honest picture, with all sorts of elements in it, out of which you can draw your own conclusions. It presents intriguing pieces of the picture. 
EW: I’m a historian, not a critic. 

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties Hardcover – August 13 2015, by Elijah Wald

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“If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him. He masters it.”

Walt Whitman

“How does it feel? To be without a home, Like a complete unknown, Like a rolling stone?”

Bob Dylan

“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs….”

Pete Seeger

While A Complete Unknown, a recent film about Bob Dylan by the director James Mangold is a triumph of style over substance, it has one redeeming aspect in that it was based loosely on the excellent 2015 book by Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric.

Wald’s previous books include Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music. Wald’s insights into Dylan’s world are probably helped by the fact he is a musician. As one writer said of Wald, “He possesses that rare ability to weave meticulous research into engaging narratives propelled by conversational but polished prose. It’s as if someone with an advanced degree in history and musicology who witnessed the events first-hand is talking to you.”[1]

The years covered by Wald’s book were extraordinarily intense. Much like today’s youth, many at the time began to shift to the left and sought answers to complex political events. However, it is completely natural that their radicalism was inevitably confused. Musical protest was still largely dominated by the Stalinist politics of the Communist Party or other equally wretched political entities such as Maoism, Castroism and the New Left. What had once been the Trotskyist movement in the US, the Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon, broke with Marxism in 1963 and set out on a wretched, anti-revolutionary course.

Unlike Mangold’s film, Wald does touch on the political and ideological intricacies of the time. Wald delves into certain aspects of Dylan’s personality, musical background and political events that shaped his world outlook. James Brewer writes, “The first deployment of combat troops was carried out by President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965, about the same time as Dylan’s plugged-in performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Wald’s book documents that a performer at Newport in 1965 named Len Chandler declared himself opposed to Johnson’s sending more troops to Vietnam. That was the only mention of the conflict during the Festival.”[2]

Wald starts the book by examining Dylan’s relationship with Pete Seeger. Alongside Woody Guthrie, Seeger was a significant influence on the young Dylan. Seeger quickly recognised that Dylan was unlike anything or anyone that had gone before, saying, “I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do.”

Wald writes that Seeger and his followers “believed they were working for the good of humanity … but were intensely aware of the forces marshalled against them: the capitalist system and the moneyed interests that upheld it”.[3] Wald concludes the chapter on Seeger’s sentencing in 1961 for contempt of Congress when he refuses to name names of associates with connections to the Communist Party. He quotes Seeger, saying, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.”[4]

While Seeger was a significant figure in Dylan’s formative years, the singer and writer Woody Gutherie was certainly the most important. Dylan said of the radical songwriter, “You could learn how to live.”. As Clement Daly perceptively wrote, “At its best, there is an almost universal and deeply popular element in Guthrie’s music. His songs rarely descended into pessimism or cynicism. On the contrary, much of his work, like his songs written for the Bonneville Power Administration promoting the construction of the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, is suffused with optimism. What was later released as the 17-song Columbia River Collection contains some of his best work, the later revisions reflecting his pro-Roosevelt and pro-war stance notwithstanding. In songs like “Talking Columbia,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Roll On Columbia, Roll On,” and “Pastures of Plenty,” Guthrie’s enthusiasm for the future of humanity is palpable.”[5]

The early Dylan was like a musical sponge. As the writer Paul Bond noted, “Dylan was listening to all sorts of music—country, the blues of Muddy Waters, and, eventually, folk. The latter, which had grown in part out of ethnomusicological research into traditional songs as “music of the people,” had been promoted by the Stalinist Communist Party and other left circles as a means of tackling contemporary issues and espousing a broadly progressive political outlook in popular song. In contrast to the banality of such contemporary songs as “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window. At the same time, the American folk scene offered a wide range of performance models, accepting the high-art theatricality of a John Jacob Niles alongside Guthrie’s more “home-spun” performances. In the American scene, there was not the same emphasis on formal “authenticity” as there was to be in the English folk revival. Alongside the content of the music, therefore (“Folk music delivered something I felt about life, people, institutions and ideology”), Dylan was also receptive to its forms, describing it as “traditional music that sounded new.”[6]

One thing missing from Wald’s book is a detailed examination of Dylan’s relationship, albeit indirectly, with the American Communist Party. Both Seeger and Guthrie had deep connections to the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. Dylan sought to play down his debt to the Communist Party and, for that matter, any political affiliation. Saying that he did not know of Pete Seeger’s politics (“I didn’t realise he was a Communist. I didn’t know what a Communist was, and if I did, it wouldn’t have mattered to me”) and his intimate relationship with the daughter of former Communist Party member shows his denials are not believable.

Suffice it to say the British Communist Party were less than enamoured with Dylan. It saw Dylan as threatening their control of “ British Music”.  In 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) issued a pamphlet, The American Threat to British Culture. The pamphlet outlined the British CP’s hostility to young American folk music. The CP followed that pamphlet with its infamously and completely nationalist British Road to Socialism, a reformist and complete refutation of Marxism, swapping the world revolution with the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’. The British CP were hostile to any outside influence that would cut across its nationalist path and that included the American folk scene.

As Frank Riley writes, “ A debate about ‘purity’ and ‘workers’ songs’ raged in the British folk world, with Ewan MacColl being a leading protagonist. He eventually reached the absurd position that if a singer was from England, the song had to be English; if American, the song had to be American, and so on. There were also detailed definitions of ‘traditional’, ‘commercial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘amateur’, etc. This was adopted as policy in those folk clubs (a majority) where MacColl and his supporters held sway. Enter Bob Dylan into this minefield. In 1962, Dylan came to Britain. After some difficulty getting into the Singer’s Club, based in the Pindar of Wakefield pub in London, he was allowed to sing three songs, two of them his own. Contemporary accounts say MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who ran the club, were hostile. As Dylan was little known, one interpretation could be that Alan Lomax had talked to them about him. Dylan did not get on well with Carla Rotolo – a relationship immortalised in Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D: “For her parasite sister I had no respect” – so this may explain it. Or it may be that they did not regard his self-written songs as ‘valid’ folk. Later, when Dylan was pronounced anathema by the CP, MacColl went one step further and announced that all of Dylan’s previous work in the folk idiom had not been true folk music.”[7]

To conclude, seeing how far the modern-day Dylan is removed from that political and cultural ferment is staggering. As Dylan admitted, “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written,“ he told CBS. In his memoir, Dylan said, “You must get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.” The musician Randy Newman concurs, saying, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he did on those first two records.“ That’s not just a quip regarding the quality; he quite literally doesn’t write the way he used to.

His acceptance of the Medal of Honour from former president Barrack Obama and his selling of his back catalogue for a huge amount of money means he has finally ceased to be a voice of any generation. As David Walsh succinctly puts it, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes––which threatened to “slow down” or even block his rise––by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”[8]

[1] https://wlm3.com/tag/albert-grossman/

[2] A Complete Unknown: A drama about singer Bob Dylan’s rise to fame-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/03/kxvr-j03.html

[3] Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties Hardcover – August 13 2015, by Elijah Wald

[4] The official transcript of Pete Seeger’s appearance before HUAC can be found in Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area. Part 7: Entertainment. Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, First Session. August 17-18, 1955.  (Joyner Docs CWIS: Y 4: Un 1/2: C 73/55/pt. 7; additional circulating copy in Joyner Docs Stacks: Y 4: Un 1/2: C 73/55/pt. 7)

[5] 100 years since singer Woody Guthrie’s birth- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/08/guth-a28.html

[6] Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html

[7] We live in a political world-Bob Dylan and the Communist Party-https://socialismtoday.org/archive/144/dylan.html

[8] Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/nobe-o21.htm

House Keeping For Historians-Chris Thompson

~ freerein61 ~ 1 Comment

Over the last few days I have been doing some large-scale housekeeping by copying myriad files from my documents, downloads, pictures, old CD-Roms and DVDs to external hard drives and newly-purchased DVDs. Keeping track of a quarter of a century’s records is a confusing business, especially since it is easy to forget where one has saved important and interesting files.  

But the whole process reminded me of the importance of keeping proper records, particularly of material likely to be of interest to future generations of historians. I think this applies to ephemeral as well as to more enduring sources. If I think of the major figures of my own time as an undergraduate and postgraduate, it is disappointing to find that so little survives of them lecturing or giving conference or seminar papers.  

Only fragments from television and radio broadcasts at best. Technological progress has, however, made it practicable to record such material for later scholars. It will be possible to see and hear figures like Richard Cust, Ann Hughes, Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and many others for many years into the future. It should also be possible to track more ephemeral material to be found in blogs, on the sites of local history societies, on Youtube and so on. I am keen on both sorts of evidence being preserved and hope that many academic historians are making arrangements to ensure that their archives pass into safe hands for the future. 

BOOK REVIEW: Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power-By Konrad Heiden (translated by Ralph Manheim) Paperback 614 pages

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“Heiden was a young socialist student in Munich when he first saw Hitler speak. It was 1923, the year of inflation and political chaos in Germany. Heiden was not impressed by what he saw: a self-centered demagogue at the head of what he calls the army of uprooted and disinherited.”

Richard Overy

“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside those of the twentieth century, the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

Leon Trotsky-From What Is National Socialism

“fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”

― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

First published in 1944, Konrad Heiden’s superb biography of Adolf Hitler culminated in 20 years of study and political opposition to Hitler. The book covers from the 1920s up to June 1934. Heiden wrote and researched it in near real-time, and it is one of the best biographies on the subject of Hitler and the rise of German fascism. As Robert Gale Woolbert, in his review, correctly writes Heiden’s book is “A profusion of detail and brilliant psychological understanding. The analysis is not only of the man but of his movement and the economic, social, and intellectual disorder on which it fed and finally attained success”.[1]

While many modern-day historians, such as Daniel Goldhagen,[2] have placed the blame for the rise of German fascism and the Holocaust on “ordinary Germans,” it was, however, a shock to see Gale Woolbert’s 1944 review containing and defending the same right-wing theory. Wollbert writes, “Where many will feel that Heiden’s explanation breaks down is in his unwillingness to place responsibility for Nazism squarely on the German people or any important class or group among them. This ability to dodge the necessity of rigorous and honest self-criticism seems to characterize even the German liberals and German Jews who have suffered most at the hands of their countrymen.[3]

Despite being over eighty years old, Heiden’s book has a contemporary relevance. It should be read alongside Leon Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism by all those who want to understand the development of fascism of the past and the present. The British Historian Richard Overy writes the introduction. Overy highly praises and defends the book against those who have sought to downplay its significance.

Since its publication over eighty years ago, there has been a veritable cottage industry solely devoted to the study of Hitler and German fascism with varying degrees of success. But as John Lukacs writes in his book The History of Hitler, “We are not yet finished with Hitler (“[wir sind] mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig”), wrote two members of a younger generation of German historians, independently of each other, in the 1980s–and this is so in both the broader and the narrower sense of “finished.” The first of these should be evident. History means the endless rethinking–and reviewing and revisiting–of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again. There is nothing profound in this observation since this is what all thinking is about. The past is the only thing we know. All human knowledge springs from past knowledge. All human thinking involves a rethinking of the past.

This is true in the narrower sense, too, involving the historical profession. The notion that once the scientific method has been applied accurately, with all extant documents exhausted, the work will be finished, and the result will be final (“the final and definitive history of the Third Reich, certified by German, American, British, Russian, liberal and conservative, nationalist and Jewish historians”) is a nineteenth-century illusion. There are probably more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, while there is no certainty that the 101st may not furnish something new and valid. What may matter even more than the accumulated quantity of the research (note the word “re-search”) is the quality of the revision. What is its purpose? In the broader sense, the purpose of historical knowledge is more than accuracy; it is understanding. In the narrower sense, the purpose of a revisionist historian may be exposé, scandal, sensation–or the more or less unselfish wish to demolish untruths. It may be his desire for academic or financial success, to further his advancement in the eyes of his colleagues, or, in the greater world, to gain publicity, or to further the cause of a political or national ideology–on which the treatment of his subject sometimes depends. There will be evidence in this book that this applies on this occasion–to the historical treatment of Hitler too.”[4].

Hitler has legitimately long fascinated historians, but the fascination of sections of the British ruling elite and aristocracy[5] who saw Hitler as an ally against Bolshevism is not so legitimate. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a huge publishing success–in England and the United States, especially before the war. During my research for this article, I paid a trip to the London Library to find other work by Heiden on Hitler and the Nazis (a term that Heiden coined). I don’t know who was surprised more, me or the librarian, to see a copy of Heiden’s History of National Socialism published in 1934 in London by Meuthen and Co. Ltd with a gold embossed swastika on both the spine and cover. Perhaps all the more galling since Heiden was an active socialist. You can draw your own conclusions.

It would be a mistake to see this book as another Hitler biography. Heiden was an active socialist in opposition to Hitler and German fascism. He was a member of the German Social Democratic Party(SPD). Heiden, son of a German trade union official, had studied Hitler for 23 years. So much so that, according to Dorothy Thompson, he followed Hitler “like a Javert tracking down his man.”[6]

As David North writes in his excellent review of Goldhagen’s book “ The History of the German social democracy, in the years when it represented a revolutionary mass movement of the working class—that is, from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War I in 1914—is one of unrelenting struggle against anti-Semitism. The exigencies of the political struggle in the working class required an intransigent attitude toward all forms of anti-Semitic propaganda. Aside from democratic principles and moral considerations, the Social Democratic Party saw the association of anti-Semitism with demagogic anticapitalist rhetoric as an attempt to disorient the working class and subordinate it to the political representatives of the middle class.”[7] Heiden completely agreed with the program of the SPD and fought for it with every waking moment. The Gestapo hunted him, and he only just escaped with his life.

I have been unable to ascertain whether Heiden read any of Leon Trotsky’s writings on German fascism, but some of Heiden’s analysis of the class nature of German fascism would not look out of place in the work of Trotsky. Heiden writes, “They drew to them “the flotsam, the stragglers living on the fringe of their class . . . the unemployed . . . the declassed of all classes.” In all ages, this has been the way of counterrevolution: an upper layer that has lost its hold in society seeks the people and finds the rabble. The officers were out to find a demagogue, of whom it could be said that he was a worker. They found their leader in the lowest mass of their subordinates. The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure.[8]

Perhaps Heiden’s most important contribution has been to understand and explain the nature of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was, according to Heiden, a by-product of his all-consuming hatred of the proletariat. Hitler, he explained,” hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into a product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this production process. All his life, the workers were, for him, a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass. Everything that he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies. Herein lies the key to an understanding of Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labor movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because it was led by Jews; the Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement.” Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism.”[9]

It would be fair to say that history has not been very kind to Heiden’s Marxist analysis of the rise of Hitlerite fascism. The modern-day Marxist writer David North rescued Heiden from the “condescension of history.” Apart from North, Heiden has largely been ignored, and his opposition to the right-wing historiography that is so loved today that “ordinary Germans” were responsible for fascism has been written out of today’s history books. Heiden shared the same fate when he wasWhile still alive. His Heiden’s books and Marxist analysis came under heavy attack.

In an article called The Mass-Man: Hitler, Hans Kohn starts by praising Heiden’s work, saying, “Mr. Heiden’s extremely well-written book is based on expert knowledge of the biographical material and the political background of Hitler’s rise to power. The dramatic terseness and vividness of its narrative have lost nothing in the excellent translation. Its brilliant analysis of German and, curiously enough, also of Russian politics makes the book not only a journalistic masterpiece but an authentic work of historical scholarship.

Kohn’s real opposition to Heiden comes to the fore when he writes, “Yet the crucial question of the essentially German nature of Hitlerism is not answered: Mr. Heiden seems to regard Hitler as representing the mind not only of the German masses but of the modern masses everywhere. Though he perceives the deep tie binding Hitler to the German masses and them to him, he often writes as if Hitler had to conquer the German masses against their innermost will. Hitlerism then appears as an international movement which could have happened anywhere and which found in Germany only its accidental starting point. Such an opinion underrates the deep roots of Hitlerism and Stalinism in the intellectual soil and the social structure of Germany and Russia, and at the same time, the intrinsic strength and the survival value of Western civilization.”[10]

Perhaps the most provocative and repellent review of Heiden’s work comes from the pens of the New York Times. They claimed Heiden was a propagandist and uncritically reported: “To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One of the Nazis’ acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books. The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision…. In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism, was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over… In 1933, he fled.”[11]

Despite giving world governments significant examples of the Nazi’s intentions and his books contained some of the earliest first-hand reports of Jews who fell victim to torture and internment at Dachau near Munich, Sachsenhausen or Oranienburg near Berlin, or Buchenwald near Weimar following the mass arrests of 1938 western capitalist governments did nothing to prevent the subsequent Holocaust.

Heiden is well worth reading today, and it is to David North’s credit this great historian of the 20th century can be read in the 21st century.

Further Reading

How To Read Hitler- Neil Gregor

The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (Merit S.) Paperback – Illustrated, 1 Jun. 1971by L. Trotskii (Author), George Breitman (Editor)

Heiden’s Selected works

History of National Socialism (Berlin, 1932)

Birth of the Third Reich (Zürich, 1934)

Hitler: A Biography (Zürich, appeared in two volumes, 1936–1937)

The New Inquisition (New York City, 1939)

Der Führer – Hitler’s Rise to Power (Boston, 1944)

[1]Der Fuehrer-Reviewed by Robert Gale Woolbert-April 1944

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1944-04-01/der-fuehrer

[2] See David North The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.wsws.org

[3] www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1944-04-01/der-fuehrer

[4] The Hitler of History- Chapter One http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lukacs-hitler.html?scp=80&sq=english%20history&st=cse

[5] See The Queen’s Nazi salute: Historical revisionism in the service of state censorship

Julie Hyland-22 July 2015- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/22/nazi-j22.html

[6] National Socialism: Theory and Practice Dorothy Thompson July 1935 Published on July 1, 1935-Foreign Affiairs

[7] David North The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.wsws.org

[8] Der  Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power-Konrad Heiden—Haughton, Mifflin

[9] Der  Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power-Konrad Heiden—Haughton, Mifflin

[10] The Mass-Man: Hitler-By Hans Kohn-April 1944- http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/04/the-mass-man-hitler/655063

[11] www.spartacus-educational.com/Konrad_Heiden.htm

Review: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens-Narrated by Hugh Grant- Audible Studios 2024

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 “Oh Heaven, could you have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at”.

Charles Dickens

“[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.

Karl Marx

“Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official, respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course, enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child, including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.”

David Walsh

“ In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. ”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I would be lying if I said I celebrate Christmas. It is a time to eat and relax and probably write, as this article written on Christmas day, testifies. I tend to observe Christmas, and one of my few traditions is to spend Christmas with Charles Dickens.

Specifically A Christmas Carol. First, I read the book for the first time this Christmas, and second, I listened to this excellent audiobook by Hugh Grant. Grant is a much-underrated actor, and this audiobook is superbly narrated.

Everyone knows the story inside out. First published as a novella by Chapman & Hall on Dec. 19 1843. Dickens was not the only social commentator at the time of writing a Christmas Carol. Karl Marx, a great admirer of Dickens, walked the same London streets for over 20 years.  Marx, Engels and Dickens were horrified by and wrote about the squalor produced by the Industrial Revolution. Engel’s famous work captured the poverty and squalor in England.[1]

There is, of course, a world of difference between Marx, Engels and Dickens. However, you would not glean that from numerous radical organisations that want to claim Dickens as a radical socialist and champion of the working class. As the Stalinist Nick Matthews writes, “It would be nice to think, too, that Marx’s use of the metaphor of the spectre that begins The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe…” so soon after those in A Christmas Carol, is more than coincidental.”[2]

This may well be correct, but the writer George Orwell understood Dicken’s class position much better. He wrote, “Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and despite his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed, but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.

It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’ without showing much awareness of who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton, ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England’, and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, dirt, and life upon the straggling streets, and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc., etc.”[3]

While Vladimir Lenin hated Dickens, Marx liked him and wrote “ “[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.

To close, as Paul Bond wrote, “ It is In the 154 years since the death of the author, none of the central contradictions of the existing social order have been resolved. The exploitation so vividly portrayed in Dickens’s works continues to be a feature of everyday life over vast swathes of the planet, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Yet, even in those countries where grinding poverty was ameliorated in some measure through the struggles of the working class and the establishment of the welfare state introduced under the shadow of the Russian Revolution, there is a serious risk of a return to the Dickensian nightmare.”[4]

[1]  Condition of the Working Class in England Written: September 1844 to March 1845   http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

[2] A Christmas Carol and the Communist Manifesto- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/christmas-carol-and-communist-manifesto

[3] George Orwell-Charles Dickens-orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english

[4] Today’s social divide and the Charles Dickens bicentenary-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/02/dick-f23.html

Comment On The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024

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 I want to comment on the recent article on the World Socialist website entitled The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover. The article is concise and spot-on. It is a culmination of months of analysis provided by WSWS.org on the current betrayal by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).

The CWU has become an open mouthpiece of Royal Mail and Kretinsky himself. Since the betrayal of the last postal strike, the union has worked around the clock to pave the way for the takeover of Royal Mail by Kretinsky.

As the recent article by Hyland and Tiernan states:

“The CWU’s deal with Kretinsky, “Rebuilding Royal Mail: A Framework Agreement between EP Group and CWU”, was unanimously endorsed by the CWU Postal Executive Tuesday. It sets out the union’s corporatist partnership with EP Group’s investors and gives union officials a seat at the boardroom table.”[1]

It goes on, “ Ward claimed the agreements with Kretinsky “give us the best chance of rebuilding Royal Mail.”Nothing could be further from the truth. The agreements seek Royal Mail’s transformation into a gig-economy parcel business to compete with Amazon. It is part of a global restructuring of the post and logistics sector, using AI and automation to slash thousands of jobs.”

Now, compare this analysis of a genuine and orthodox Marxist position to the analysis peddled by the UK Socialist Workers Party(SWP). In a recent article (which must be said is the only analysis the SWP has made in over five months at the least), “Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off, “[2] the SWP takes obfuscation to a new level.

They write.” The postal workers’ CWU union is positive about the deal. It insists that Kretinsky has signed up to significant protection against asset stripping and breaking up the company. And it says that it and the government now have a greater say in how the firm will be run”. This is a lie and completely disarms postal workers as to the true nature of the CWU, the Labour government and Kretinsky. The SWP has become not only a cover for the treachery of the CWU but has become a mouthpiece for Kretinsky, writing that “he pledges that he wants to invest in Royal Mail for the long term. Kretinsky says he has no plans for compulsory redundancies and instead wants to expand the workforce.” Again, this is a direct lie. It is clear to anyone that the SWP is now a junior partner of not only the CWU bureaucracy but also a mouthpiece of the Labour Government and Kretinsky himself.

Any postal worker wishing to fight the CWU’s open betrayal should join the Postal Workers Rank-and File Committee/IWA-RFC and listen and participate in the  PWRFC’s next online meeting on Sunday, January 5, at 7 pm. It will discuss the takeover agreed upon between Kretinsky, the Labour government and the CWU and a strategy to fight back.

[1] The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover

Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/20/yvdt-d20.html

[2] “Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off-https://socialistworker.co.uk/trade-unions/royal-mail-deal/

The Soul of Men and Women Before Socialism by Ruth Hutchinson

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How Socialists Might Inspire a Broad Section of the Working Class to Fight Once Again For Socialism. Some preliminary comments

 “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets sail.” 

Oscar Wilde

Socialism is not an empty word to me. It means different things to different people, but for me, it is about a better world. In this world, there is no war, poverty, manmade diseases, oppression, manipulation and exploitation. Humans enter into a completely different set of relations where they associate freely to decide what is needed, how it should be produced and how it is distributed. We (the people) democratically control the vast resources of the world and set them to work for the benefit of the many. As Wilde comments, there is a place here for Utopia, Imagination and Vision.

How this new world might come about in the 21st century is problematic but not impossible. Utopian thinkers have been given little respect in the Marxist movement of the 20th century and this one and I believe they should re-examine Marx’s relationship, Lenin’s relationship also to this. Marx and Engels had huge respect for the Utopian Socialists and Lenin thought that not enough “useful dreaming” occurred within the party of what a future society would look like. What Marx did not respect were the sterile sects that followed the great Utopian thinker. There is confusion and a misunderstanding of Marx within some sections of the Marxist movement and what passes as the Revolutionary Left.

The world is a crazy and irrational place. But what is particularly crazy is this, and this really is what has been taking place. Ask a Socialist what Socialism looks like, and they won’t be able to tell you. They might say, “We don’t have a blueprint for Socialism”, “It is not our job to prescribe this sort of thing but to be fought out by the workers themselves”. This is a terrible state of affairs, and if socialists don’t have a clue about what a future society will or could look like, then how the hell is the working class going? This is the product of an objectivist outlook very common in sectarian organisations and has nothing in common with a dialectical philosophical outlook that Marx, Engels or Lenin used.

Speaking about a better world should not be a taboo subject. Speaking about the ills that we face under this system of commodity production where a ruling class exploits without the blink of an eye, what could be done to replace this and how to replace it should be given priority and a hearing. What we are facing right now and what we have lived through these past 30 years is crazy. It has been one crisis, war, disaster or scandal after another. The average person is absolutely fed up and is crying out for leadership and political representation that reflects their wishes, and that is up to the task of inspiring the working class and leading it to victory. Right now, we don’t have that.

The nineteenth century was imbued with an entirely different spirit, as we see in Oscar Wilde’s work. We see it in William Morris, too. Morris was even brave enough to write the novel “News From Nowhere” which wants to express some ideas about what a future society might look like. Where are our modern day equivalents to Wilde and Morris? They don’t exist. But I anticipate a renewed interest in these writers. Just like Gerrard Winstanley was rescued from obscurity, other writers and thinkers will hopefully be rescued. I hope to be a part of that rescue mission. But what does it have to say to us in the 21st century?

The human spirit is a tremendous force that can endure and overcome, but it has to be imbued with hope. I want to say that where there’s a will, there’s a way, but the reverse is also true. Where there’s a way, there will more likely be a will. The socialists are not showing the way or giving inspiration because they choose to look away and engage in constant debates and arguments that the working class doesn’t give a shit about. The working class has no time to wade through 1000 pages of some tract without immediate alleviating wisdom. It is too worn down to constantly hear about the betrayals and losses right now. That’s for the revolutionary to bring to the working class.

In all the jobs I’ve had, they are front-facing with members of the public. I do not see myself as separate from them, for I know I face the same struggles. I don’t shy away but want to understand the patient in my chair and ask how has this disease process taken hold, what is the aetiology of this and the pathogenesis of that? When we understand the enemy, we have a chance at treatment, but the success of that will depend on many things and will depend on how inspired the patient is and how confident they are at winning. Without hope, my patient may not be fair too well!

The socialist movement is no different. The last great movement we had that was guided by a belief in a better world was in the ’60s. Where are the equivalents of Martin Luther King and JFK? Where are our musicians that are equivalent to Jimmy Hendrix, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain or Tupac? Where are the equivalents of Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or Oppenheimer? Where are they? Where are the Historians that are equivalent to Hill or Thompson?  What about new Orwells, Steinbecks or Millers?  We have lost something, and it was a faith, passion and vision that the future could be different. There is a total malaise around this, with the Marxist movement also contributing by failing to correct this by keeping a vision of a better future alive by examining how the productive forces could be used creatively to meet real wants and needs. Whatever your politics or beliefs are is not my concern. All I can hope for is that I am read with an open mind and given the basic right to express an opinion. One thing I can agree on is the question of dead dogs. A whole load of dead dogs also lie on the bodies of Utopian thinkers that have been placed there by so-called Marxists. They ignore these thinkers, unlike Marx and don’t know how to deal with them. The movement is sterile now and impoverished due to adaptation to objectivism and ignoring the subjective factor. Marxists have to win over both hearts and minds and if it chooses (the revolutionary Marxist movement) to ignore the heart of humans.

Then fascism will appeal more confidently as it knows better how to exploit repressed emotion. It’s not a game anymore, and just like Orwell talks about in The Road to Wigan Pier, we still have the same problems. The working class is not attracted to asceticism or sectarianism, nor am I. What I propose to do in my writing is rescue some branches of thought and ideas, give them a hearing and try to appeal to those that are more thoughtful.

I recently contacted a revolutionary party and asked what socialists would do about the dark web. I wondered what the banking system would look like under socialism. I have received no reply, and it must have been three months ago that I wrote in. I have questions that are not being answered. I am not surprised that they are not being answered, but I’m surprised that I might have to answer these myself. I know I don’t have all the answers but I sure know I will have to try and find some. There was also something that troubled me recently. It was a podcast and the host (posturing as a revolutionary) commented on someone liking Ska music and that that should be seen as a red flag. How the movement will attract the working class when it holds such prejudices is cause for major concern. They will remain a closed club, and Orwell knew this all too well.

As mentioned, I would like to rescue some thoughts, writers and thinkers from a pile of dead dogs and start to assimilate their thoughts and answer some of my very own burning questions. A burning question for me is why was it that Gerrard Winstanley was able to cut a path to a revolutionary road and his peers didn’t quite get there. What was peculiar to Winstanley that was absent in others? The same can be applied to Lenin. Why was Lenin able to see further? What is it about these human personalities and their experiences that enabled and gave birth to this? I believe the world is knowable and I believe that coincidence is just the measure of our ignorance. There is a reason for everything even if we don’t fully grasp what those reasons are right this moment, the searching shouldn’t stop. It is not enough for me to say that it was just the genius of Winstanley. I would love to examine the genesis of his thought, but his collected works are £300, and I don’t have that spare. What is interesting to me is that he replaced the word god with reason. I believe that since he married the daughter of a surgeon, being around the medical profession at that time had some bearing on him. It is a special profession with its Hippocratic oath and scientific method. It is also a profession that was not alienated from its own labour, and there was no division in the surgeon but a unity of manual and intellectual labour working for the greater good. This gave them a certain outlook that was quite separate and peculiar to other branches of activity. It is just a theory and yet to be fully explored, but Winstanley was different and I don’t see it just as an accident in that it can’t be explained. This is just my opinion, of course. Thanks for reading, and serious comments are welcome. This is just a piece of prose, and footnotes can be provided. I am just interested in getting things down on paper at this stage.

Some of the thinkers and trends I would like to comment on in the future or have an interest in reading are as follows:  Wiliam Morris, Erich Fromm, Freud, William Blake, The State of my Profession, The NHS, Trump, state of reason, the cultural level, P Diidy, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, John Potash, Shaun Attwood, John Wedger, the dark web, the Cabal/Illuminati, Q-Anon, Maggie Oliver, Judy Mikovich, Anthony Fauci, Andreas Moritz, Dr Robert Malone,Marcuse, Hegel, what appeals to me most about Marx’s thought. The Salem Witch Hunts, children’s literature, Anna Freud, Bruno Bettleheim, Marshall Berman and Oliver James. I will want to express what I have found interesting in their thought and why it is so. I can reflect on myself and ask what is piquing my interest. What is it that I am relating to? 

Here’s an example:  I believe and live by this as closely as possible. I don’t allow much into my house that I don’t find beautiful or useful. I hate waste, and I hate junk. William Morris was the same. Having been around art and design, I can relate well to Morris in what he has to say, and I would like to discuss his relevance but also ask why I am like this, too. Over the past 18 months since my child left to study a degree in chemistry I have had much freedom to explore and listen to many podcasts and spend more time socialising. There are trends and things happening in our world that I have not had the chance to explore or knowledge of. They should not be dismissed but given a hearing by the widest possible audience. I don’t know what I believe regarding some of it, as there isn’t enough evidence yet to make an informed conclusion, but I have been astonished by some of the things I have learnt. The question isn’t wheter it is true or not but is a fight to get access to information that will verify such questions. I will argue that revolutionaries should be a part of that fight if only they would listen. I write……………………….. to be continued.

I would like to draw attention to a paragraph from Christopher Hill’s “The World Turned Upside Down.”

“Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as “ the lunatic fringe.” Hill goes on to thank many people for their work, for without them and their work, subjects such as alchemy, astrology and natural magic can now take their place as reasonable subjects for rational men and women to be interested in. Further still, Hill says

“Historians would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase “lunatic fringe”. Lunacy, like beauty, maybe in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeenth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us to understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms and that the lunatic may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him”.

With that being said by such a respected historian, I hope that what I wish to discuss will be given the same respectful and open-minded treatment as Hill is urging for here, as there is much to be gleaned and learnt if one could just drop the arrogance and snobbishness. Hill echoes Erich Fromm here, who was a Freudo-Marxist who thought that when his patients were experiencing psychosis, they were fleeing into this peculiar state of thinking because they were escaping the insanity around them. In other words, the patient retreated into this state because they were sane but couldn’t square themselves to the conditions they were experiencing because the patient was actually more sane and found it intolerable. The protest couldn’t be expressed outwardly but was turned in on itself. It has to go somewhere, and that disturbance is felt within the psyche.

Now, just for a minute, think here. Out of all the words Hill has written, this chimes with me and out of all the other other possible paragraphs I choose this. That’s not an accident. Christopher Hill is good company to be in, and I’ve only just started to read him in the past 4 weeks. I have talked to many people in my life due to the work I have undertaken and come up against some very difficult positions and attitudes. They have to be understood, not dismissed outright. It won’t lead to anything new by dismissing it. Back in the 90’s, I was lucky enough to visit the Hayward Gallery, where the Prinzhorn collection was being exhibited. When the pieces are examined, and you know what you are looking at, Hill makes even more sense. The Prinzhorn Collection is for another time. But it is a collection of over 5000 pieces of art drawn by inpatients of psychiatric institutions. It is troubling what is being expressed visually but it finds expression nonetheless and is not as insane as one might think.

Sober. My Story. My Life. By Tony Adams and Ian Ridley, Simon & Schuster £9.99

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“I’ve got no angst of the past any more. I’ve cleaned that up – I’m 28 years without a drink or a drug. I’m comfortable in my skin for the first time in my life. I’ve grown up. There are no tentacles from the past now.”

Tony Adams

‘I have an illness. I’ve accepted that.’

Paul Merson

Tony Adams’ two books, addicted and now Sober, make it abundantly clear that his struggles with alcoholism have impacted greatly on his life and relationships with other people.

Astonishingly, Addicted was published in 1999 while Adams was still Arsenal and England captain. Addicted, like its sequel, Sober was a brutally honest account of his life as a recovering alcoholic. “I walk the walk today. I’m fully recovered but still go to regular meetings and three, four prisons a year, passing the message on to the newcomer that help is out there.”

Sober, published in 2018, covers the last five years of Adams’s playing career and his attempts at football management. Like Addicted, Sober is written with the help of writer  Ian Ridley. Ridley is an excellent writer. How much of the book Adams wrote would be interesting to know, but his voice comes from the pages. Ridley himself is a recovering alcoholic. In a 2017 interview Ridley explains how he first met Adams.

“I knew Tony of course, with him playing for Arsenal and England and me a national paper football correspondent, but he had little liking for the press. We met properly, introduced by Paul Merson, when Tony got sober in August 1996. I had been sober from my alcoholism for about eight years by that time. With Addicted, he wanted to get across to people who might have a drink problem that there was a solution and help available. I recall a wonderful moment when it was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1998. It didn’t win, but at the award ceremony, a waiter came up to me with a glass of mineral water and said: “I’m sorry your book didn’t win, Mr Ridley, but if it’s any consolation, I read this book a couple of months ago, realised I had a problem, went to AA, and I’ve been sober ever since. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I rang Tony. “That’s why we wrote it,” he said. “Not to win awards but to help people.”[1]

When asked by the interviewer so why the sequel?. Ridley replied, “Tony wanted to do Sober 20 years on to show that it is possible to have a great life without the booze. He also wanted to tell people what happened after Arsenal. There is plenty of new material, including Sporting Chance and Tony’s times as Portsmouth coach when they won the FA Cup. He also talks about his experiences in Azerbaijan and China, when he suffered a heart attack in the former and virtually a nervous breakdown in the latter.”

The book, unsurprisingly, is dominated by the language of AA and recovery. Adams is proud of his long struggle to found Sporting Chance, a charity dedicated to helping athletes and women with addictions. In a Guardian interview, he describes reaching rock bottom and needing help: “I needed a lot of pain. Alcohol gave me a good hiding; prison, intensive care, pissing myself, shitting myself, still not giving up. Do you know what I mean? Sleeping with people I didn’t want to sleep with. I have to remind myself at the end of my drinking, I did not want to live, but I didn’t know how to kill myself. I was at a ‘jumping off point’, as we call it. I got there, and only then could I ask for help.”[2]

Adams’s life in management was not as successful as his playing career. As one reviewer recounts, Adams “ took various courses and coaching badges before trying his hand at management with Wycombe. After resigning there, he returned to education before joining Portsmouth as Harry Redknapp’s assistant during their high-spending days, including an FA Cup victory. He ultimately became manager after Harry left but appears never to have had much chance due to budget cuts before asking to be fired to save himself from resigning. From here, Adams’s career took an odd, international turn. After briefly coaching in Azerbaijan, he stepped into a general manager/consultant-type role in building a small Azerbaijani team from the ground up. This was followed by a connection with a Chinese football investor as Adams took on a general consulting role for Jiang Lizhang, who owned a club in China and purchased Granada in Spain.”[3]

The book will appeal to a wide audience outside of football. For Arsenal fans. It contains Adam’s insight about his footballing journey. The latest publication includes a new chapter on Adams’s relationship with the former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. Both books cover this relationship. Adams has enormous respect and fondness for Wenger; however, their relationship blew hot and cold. Perhaps the new book’s most controversial aspect is Adams questioning Arsene Wenger’s coaching.

Adams also criticised Wenger for staying too long at Arsenal: “He probably had an addiction. He couldn’t let go at the end – he’s a typical addict. He’s completely obsessed with the game every single minute. It maybe cost him relationships, and I think it cost him his job and inability to let go. It’s been bloody depressing for the last 10 years. What is to blame? “Recruitment. It’s been very poor. You get players two ways: academy or buy them in. We haven’t had the money to buy them through the transition, and I don’t think we have had the network, to be honest; 17 backroom staff gone, six scouts gone, Stevie Morrow [head of youth scouting] gone, probably the best academy scout in the country sacked. To bring players through agents it might be the way the game is going, but not how I would build. “The whole club had different values. It was smaller. It’s a different game. It’s a business now. That level of connection within the club, a disconnect with the fans, is a real issue in the game.”

Perhaps if I were being super critical, I would say that the book does not go into the deep connection between sports such as football and the huge rise of gambling, drug taking and alcoholism in society. Paul Merson’s recent documentary was a damaging indictment of the Gambling Industry’s profit-making out of human misery.[4] As Adams states, “Of the 30% of patients who come to the clinic with an addiction, 70% have a problem with gambling. “Addictions within football, we’re talking gambling,” The Premier League, it’s a bit of an epidemic to be honest.” Sober could have used the numerous academic articles that have looked into the connection between Sports and alchoholism.

In his paper, Carwyn Jones argues “ that football plays a questionable role in promoting two potentially problematic activities, namely drinking alcohol and gambling. Gambling and alcohol companies sponsor clubs and competitions and pay to advertise their products at the stadium and during television coverage. Consequently, millions of fans, including children, are exposed to the marketing of these restricted products. The latter are exposed despite regulations prohibiting such advertising and promotion in other contexts. The promotion of these activities to children and adults increases levels of consumption, which in turn increases the number of problem drinkers and gamblers in society. High-profile footballers play a further role in normalising drinking and gambling. They are role models whose actions influence others. Their excessive drinking and gambling activities provide poor examples for football fans, young and old.”[5]

Sober is an excellent companion book to Addicted. Like Addicted, it is a brutally honest appraisal of Tony Adams’s addiction and mental health struggles. In achieving sobriety, he has become an inspiration to other recovering addicts and alcoholics.

References

1.    Alcoholism and recovery: A case study of a former professional footballer

Carwyn JonesView all authors and affiliations Volume 49, Issue 3-4

https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690213516618

2.    FOOTBALL, ALCOHOL AND GAMBLING:  AN UNHOLY TRINITY?

CARWYN JONES- Vol. 51, 2 – 2015 Pag. 5–19

3.    Chapter 7 – The interrelationship between alcoholism, depression, and anxiety Richard Tindle , Farah Ghafar, Eid Abo Hamza Ahmed A. Moustafa The Nature of Depression-An Updated Review 2021, Pages 111-133

[1] www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/books-and-reviews/ridleys-20-year-journey-with-tony-adams/

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jan/31/tony-adams-alcohol-gave-me-good-hiding-i-needed-pain-sporting-chance-arsenal

[3] allsportsbooks.reviews/category/soccer/page/5/

[4] Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery- by Paul Merson- Headline Book Publishing – September 16 2021-atrumpetofsedition.org/its-up-for-grabs-now/

[5] Football, Alcohol and Gambling:  An unholy trinity? KINANTHROPOLOGICA Vol. 51, 2 – 2015

The Portuguese Workers’ Revolution 1974-5 £3.00 by Mark Osborn-2024 -Pamphlet – 44 pages ISBN 978-1-909639-70-6

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The Portuguese Workers’ Revolution 1974-5 pamphlet by Mark Osborn has been re-published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974-5. The labour movement led by the syndicalist CGT, which belonged to the Portuguese anarchists, FARP, the Socialist-led Portuguese Worker Federation, and the small Inter-Sindical Commission led by the Communist Party, entered an unholy alliance to betray the revolution. The Pabloite groups, along with the pseudo-lefts, who covered up this betrayal, acted as secondary agencies of imperialism. While purporting to examine the politics of the Portuguese worker’s revolution, this pamphlet covers this betrayal up. Despite playing only a minor role in the betrayal, Workers Liberty has workers’ and students’ blood on its hands. The betrayal of the revolution is all the more pertinent since, had the revolution succeeded, it would have delivered a mighty blow to the solar plexus of international capital and inspired revolutionary movements worldwide.

On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers overthrew Portugal’s fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could take back power at the expense of a few limited reforms. The popular front government established by the revolution, which contained a significant Communist Party presence under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, handed over power without a murmur from the numerous Pseudo left groups.

The coup was started by young military captains in the national armed forces. In her book, Raquel Varela[1] emphasises that these were only captains, as if this made them unconscious socialists. Rank and file soldiers did indeed come over to the revolution, as experienced by Bob Light, who saw first-hand soldiers giving the clenched fist salute and waving red carnations. Slogans such as ” the soldiers are sons of the workers” and “down with capitalist exploitation” were also heard on the streets. But despite these sections of the rank-and-file soldiers won the revolution, the Portuguese bourgeoisie would still control the army.

The Carnation Revolution was the latest of a line of revolutionary movements betrayed by Stalinism and Pabloism. Beginning in May 1968 in Paris,  the 1969 ‘hot autumn’ in Italy, strike waves in Germany and Britain in the early 1970s and the struggle in Greece against military rule in 1973-4. International Socialist leader Tony Cliff argued that ‘Portugal, the weakest link in the capitalist chain in Europe, can become the launching pad for the socialist revolution in the whole continent.’

Cliff’s remarks were pure bravado as his International Socialist movement ensured this did not happen. Instead of being ‘the launching pad of the socialist revolution’, the defeat of the Portuguese revolution paved the way for various neoliberalism regimes. Varela’s book is a political amnesty for the betrayals of the Stalinists and radical groups such as the IS.

Although the revolution originated in Africa, the 1974 revolution was ultimately shaped by Portugal’s belated historical development. As Paul Mitchell describes in his 2024 article, “By 1973, there were some 42,000 companies in Portugal—one-third of them employing fewer than ten workers—but about 150 companies dominated the entire economy. Most were related to foreign capital but were headed by a few wealthy Portuguese families (Espirito Santo, de Melo, de Brito, Champalimaud). For example, the de Melos’ monopoly company Companhia União Fabril (CUF) owned parts of Guinea-Bissau and produced 10 per cent of the gross national product.   Despite this industrialisation, a third of the population still worked as agricultural labourers, many in large estates or latifundia. An estimated 150,000 people lived in shantytowns concentrated around the capital, Lisbon. Food shortages and economic hardship—wages were the lowest in Europe at US$10 a week in the 1960s—led to the mass emigration of nearly 1 million people to other European countries, Brazil and the colonies.   The 1960s also saw the emergence of liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Fighting three guerrilla movements for over a decade drained the Portuguese economy and labour force. Nearly half the budget was spent on maintaining more than 150,000 African troops.[2]

He continues, “Compulsory military service lasting for four years, combined with poor military pay and conditions, laid the basis for grievances and the development of oppositional movements amongst the troops. These conscripts became the basis for the emergence of an underground movement known as the “Movement of the Captains.” The continuing economic drain caused by the African military campaigns was exacerbated by the world financial crisis that developed in the late 1960s.”

In the 1970s, the Portuguese ruling elite confronted a massive strike wave at home and uprisings in the colonies. Nearly one half of the national budget was spent keeping 150,000 troops abroad fighting the national liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. Compulsory military service combined with low pay intensified grievances in the army. It stimulated an oppositional movement amongst the troops known as the “Movement of the Captains,” which later developed into the Armed Forces Movement (MFA).

The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) or “movement of the Captains”, glorified by Varela, became an important bulwark against revolution once it was in power alongside the PCP. To stop the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class, the MFA invited the Communist Party (PCP) into government. The Communist Party was asked to take part in the First Provisional Government in May 1974 and took part in all six provisional governments. These governments were popular fronts containing trade unions, the Socialist Party, the Church, and the upper hierarchy of the armed forces.

The Socialist Party and the Church initially did not want the Communists in the government. Still, military sections knew the PCP would be useful in controlling rank-and-file soldiers and the working class. As Varela herself points out, “’The Portuguese Communist Party was prepared to abandon its radical army supporters (and a great many others) in exchange for a continued stake in government. The military left had become a burden on the Communist Party because its performance undermined the balance of power with the Nine and peaceful coexistence agreements between the USA, Western Europe and the USSR. Some 200 soldiers and officers, plus a handful of building workers, were arrested’ (p.246).

The PCP was outlawed, and its leadership was imprisoned or driven into exile. Following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the party had been purged in 1929, and Bento Gonçalves, who had only joined the organisation the previous year, was installed as General Secretary.

Cunhal joined the PCP in 1931 whilst studying law at university and left for the Soviet Union to attend a congress of Communist youth in September 1935. It was at this time that the Stalinist bureaucracy began to advance its policy of building “popular fronts” with “democratic” bourgeois governments and liberal-reformist elements worldwide, supposedly to combat fascism and defend the USSR. Cunhal, who came to epitomise the policy of popular frontism in Portugal, became the leader of the youth organisation and joined the Central Committee of the PCP in 1936 at 22.

One of the most important questions of the revolution concerned the political nature of the MFA and its “armed intervention” unit, the Continental Operations Command (COPCON—Comando Operacional do Continente)

COPCON  was composed of 5,000 elite troops. Its leader was Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. To cover over its real intentions, the MFA said it was in favour of an “alliance of the MFA and the people.”The PSP, PCP, and Pseudo groups never challenged this blatant lie. Instead, the PCP declared the MFA was a “guarantor of democracy” and developed close relations with Carvalho, General Vasco Goncalves and other members of the Junta.

The fact that the various popular front governments could operate with impunity is down to the role played by pseudo-Lefts like the IS. Readers need to know the history of the IS. As Mitchell points out, the “International Socialist (IS) organisation (today’s Socialist Workers Party in Britain) was represented by the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP—Partido Revolucionário do Proletariado). The founders of the International Socialists had broken from the Fourth International in the 1940s, claiming that the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellites was a new class in a new social system (state capitalism). This granted the Stalinist bureaucracy a certain legitimacy, not due to its parasitic character, but expressed a prostration before the post-war stabilisation of imperialism. The IS’ radical phraseology, its glorification of trade union syndicalism combined with a semi-anarchist stance, served only to conceal its refusal to challenge the political domination of the working class by the social democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies.”

The promotion of the popular front by the IS had nothing in common with orthodox Marxism. The following is its analysis of the popular front: “Poder Popular (popular power), underpinned by the Aliança Povo-MFA (an alliance of the people and the MFA), emerged as the ideology for the MFA. It set out to unite the military with workers, land workers, tenants and slum-dwellers. The military made use of the prestige acquired through carrying out the coup against the regime. Popular power was perceived as the living alternative to the bourgeois focus on parliamentary democracy. This is not to say that the army and workers were always united, but the impact of the people’s movement on the armed forces, and vice versa, came to be an integral part of the Portuguese story. But the slogan “Unity of the people and the MFA” was double-edged: not only did the people influence the army, but also the revolutionary movement’s reliance upon the radicals in the army was to be part of its undoing”.

The reader should compare the statement above with how Leon Trotsky described and evaluated the Popular Front: “The question of questions at the moment is the Popular Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical manoeuvre to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism, for it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the ‘Communists’ [i.e., Stalinists] and the Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and were in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. They demanded to break this Popular Front, destroy the Cadets’ alliance, and create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government.”

To conclude, the fact that after 45 years of the revolution, its “memory” is still in dispute is down to the treacherous role of the various Pabloite and Pseudo Left groups such as Workers Liberty. As Paul Mitchell points out, the Portuguese Revolution “would have been a mighty blow to international capital and inspired worldwide movements in the 1970s. Only the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Portuguese supporters, the League for the Construction of the Revolutionary Party (LCRP), called for the PCP and PSP to break from the bourgeois parties, the state machine and the MFA. It demanded the dissolution of the army and the creation of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets in opposition to the MFA and its proposals for a Constituent Assembly. 

Further Reading

The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell Hardcover – 4 April 2024 by Alex Fernandes 

[1] A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution

[2] Fifty years since Portugal’s Carnation Revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/24/fgtz-a24.html

Comment from Christopher Thompson

~ freerein61 ~ 2 Comments

I want to make some points from a few recent posts on your blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I am sure your readers will (or should) be aware that I am not a Marxist of any kind, so obviously, I am starting from a very different position. The rise of ‘revisionism’ in the early to mid-1970s was not, in my view, a response to a range of ‘Conservative’ political impulses. Its criticisms of Whig and Marxist explanations of the origins of the events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles arose from the weaknesses of the arguments of Tawney, Stone, Hill and others over the ‘rise of the gentry’: ‘revisionism’s’ advocates were from a variety of political standpoints – Russell was then a Labour Party supporter before becoming a Liberal Democrat: John Morrill was not a Conservative and, in the early-1980s, was a Social Democratic Party member: Kevin Sharpe was no Conservative either nor, of course, was an American like Mark Kishlansky. But one of the consequences of this shift in the period’s historiography was the divorce between political and religious history on the one hand and economic and social history on the other.

It persists if one, for example, reads Henry Reece’s recent book on the fall of the Protectorate and the demise of the Rump in the period from 1658 to 1660. There is not much trace of it either in the recent studies of Oliver Cromwell’s life. John Walter had some very important comments on this subject to make in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2015. Nonetheless, the interaction between economic and social developments and political and religious history in the British Isles under the Stuarts cannot, in my opinion, be entirely neglected. These factors interact without the former determining the latter, as some believe.

I would also like to make two further caveats. London, which appears to be the major focus for radical activities, was not England, and historians who focus on the capital seem largely oblivious to the strength of the bonds between landowners and their tenants, neighbours and allies. There were complex local arrangements for dealing with bargaining over complaints from people below the landed elites for resolving problems in local and county communities, which do not appear to have been appreciated very much since the time of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group. Despite the late Lawrence Stone’s claims, there is a case to be made that the position of the landed ‘aristocracy’ strengthened markedly in the early to middle of the seventeenth century. This is one of the factors that rendered the idea of a ‘revolution’ or, if one prefers, a ‘bourgeois revolution’ untenable. A ‘great uprising, ‘un grand soulevement’, failed.