Tag: books

Who Is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell Hardcover – March 26, 2024, by D. J. Taylor

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“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

George Orwell 1984

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”― George Orwell, Animal Farm.

The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of freedom. But for that same reason, epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.

Leon Trotsky Revolution Betrayed (1936)

The essence of Marxism consists in that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Leon Trotsky’s Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

D J Taylor’s new book is an extremely good introduction to the work of George Orwell. However, it joins an already overcrowded market, so much so Taylor was encouraged to justify his new book. It must said Taylor’s book is one of the better book releases. It is a well-researched perceptive analysis of the work of Orwell. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of many new releases and articles attempting the “uncover the real Orwell”. Some of these books and articles have been nothing more than hack work aimed at character assignation and burying Orwell ‘s reputation under a large pile of dead dogs.

Before I review Taylor’s book, I would like to say something about a recent article from the Orwell’s Society’s website[1]. The article in question was by Patrick Homes called Can We Truly Rebel? Fisher and Orwell[2]. Homes begin by mislabeling Fisher as a Marxist. Fischer was nothing of the sort. He was a pseudo-left masquerading as a Marxist and a very pessimistic one at that.

Fisher’s 2008 book Capitalist Realism offers no real alternative to Capitalism. It was easier for him to “imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”. Fisher cannot imagine a modern world without Capitalism. Not a very classical Marxist position I might add. While offering mild criticism of Capitalism, Fisher accepts that Capitalism “entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment.”[3] It would appear that Fisher has accepted Francis Fukuyama’s Mantra that we have reached the “End of History” and that Liberal Capitalism is now the only game in town.[4]

Fisher writes, “The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, and gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”[5]

Unfortunately there are no surprises in Fisher’s book. He is both hostile and disdains  orthodox Marxism and its history in equal measure, writing, “One of the left’s vices is its endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going over Kronstadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organising for a future that it believes in.”

Unlike Homes, I do not believe Fisher’s intellectual framework offers an insightful understanding of George Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four. Regardless of his faults, and there were many, Orwell did not share Fisher’s total pessimism or despair. His “Hope Lies in the Proles “ from 1984 is a clear indication that Orwell saw the working class as a revolutionary class and was the only force that could overthrow Capitalism. Orwell was not a Marxist, but throughout his life, he sought to understand and live by Marx’s theory that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[6] I am pretty sure that Orwell would have concurred with Marx’s understanding of the role of the individual in history. Marx wrote, “Men make their history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[7]

As was said earlier Taylor’s book is a fine introduction to the literature of Orwell. D. J. Taylor is a leading scholar on Orwell, and this book is the product of decades of work on Orwell. Taylor concentrates mostly on Orwell’s literary output and focuses less on his political involvement. Orwell’s trip to Spain had an enormous impact on him, and if you want to understand the real Orwell, you have to study Orwell’s experience in Spain and his book Homage To Catalonia. This book is far more important than Animal Farm or 1984. As Taylor writes, “Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown Socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.”[8] Taylor is not a Marxist and can only offer a perfunctory analysis of Orwell’s experiences in Spain.

A closer approximation of Orwell’s time in Spain can be found in the analysis of the Marxist writer Vicky Shaw, who wrote, “Orwell’s experience was different from most other artists and intellectuals, who went to Spain as supporters of the Stalinist Communist Parties, which many still associated with Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the revolutionary traditions of October 1917 and which possessed a massive apparatus for both propaganda and direct repression of dissent. For George Orwell to produce and publish such material then was, therefore, no small task. The Kremlin bureaucracy was actively seeking the physical annihilation of the entire generation of Marxist workers and intellectuals who had made the Russian Revolution in 1917 possible, while internationally, the Communist Parties were acting as the agents of Stalin in suppressing any opposition to the bureaucracy’s interests wherever such opposition appeared. Orwell’s honest account of the Spanish events also conflicted with the reigning perceptions amongst large layers of revolutionary-minded working people.

Homage to Catalonia is, therefore, a seminal text and remains an excellent introduction to the Spanish events and the strangling of the revolution by Stalinism. However, Orwell could not elaborate on a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. Eventually, the domination of the workers’ movement by the bureaucracy, combined with the victories this gave Fascism, led him to extreme forms of political demoralisation, as is seen in his book 1984. He supported the democratic imperialist powers in the Second World War”.[9]

Taylor does not make much of Orwell’s faith in the working class. In 1984, he believed the “proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a “vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles”.

That said, Orwell never clarified his position towards the 1917 October Revolution. As Fred Mazellis correctly states, “Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for “left unity,” adapting to the Stalinists and criticising Trotsky’s merciless critique of Stalinism as “sectarian.” In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, supporting the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement.”[10]

To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As John Newsinger correctly points out, “Taylor’s achievement is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school, St Cyprian’s!”.

[1] https://orwellsociety.com/

[2] https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/

[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?2008

[4] The world economic crisis and the return of history-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/meet-f02.html 

[5] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[6] The Communist Manifesto

[7]  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[8] Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell

[9] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html

[10] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/george-orwell/

Who Is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell Hardcover – March 26, 2024, by D. J. Taylor

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“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

George Orwell 1984

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”― George Orwell, Animal Farm.

The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of freedom. But for that same reason, epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.

Leon Trotsky Revolution Betrayed (1936)

The essence of Marxism consists in that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Leon Trotsky’s Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

D J Taylor’s new book is an extremely good introduction to the work of George Orwell. However, it joins an already overcrowded market, so much so Taylor was encouraged to justify his new book. It must said Taylor’s book is one of the better book releases. It is a well-researched perceptive analysis of the work of Orwell. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of many new releases and articles attempting the “uncover the real Orwell”. Some of these books and articles have been nothing more than hack work aimed at character assignation and burying Orwell ‘s reputation under a large pile of dead dogs.

Before I review Taylor’s book, I would like to say something about a recent article from the Orwell’s Society’s website[1]. The article in question was by Patrick Homes called Can We Truly Rebel? Fisher and Orwell[2]. Homes begin by mislabeling Fisher as a Marxist. Fischer was nothing of the sort. He was a pseudo-left masquerading as a Marxist and a very pessimistic one at that.

Fisher’s 2008 book Capitalist Realism offers no real alternative to Capitalism. It was easier for him to “imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”. Fisher cannot imagine a modern world without Capitalism. Not a very classical Marxist position I might add. While offering mild criticism of Capitalism, Fisher accepts that Capitalism “entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment.”[3] It would appear that Fisher has accepted Francis Fukuyama’s Mantra that we have reached the “End of History” and that Liberal Capitalism is now the only game in town.[4]

Fisher writes, “The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, and gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”[5]

Unfortunately there are no surprises in Fisher’s book. He is both hostile and disdains  orthodox Marxism and its history in equal measure, writing, “One of the left’s vices is its endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going over Kronstadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organising for a future that it believes in.”

Unlike Homes, I do not believe Fisher’s intellectual framework offers an insightful understanding of George Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four. Regardless of his faults, and there were many, Orwell did not share Fisher’s total pessimism or despair. His “Hope Lies in the Proles “ from 1984 is a clear indication that Orwell saw the working class as a revolutionary class and was the only force that could overthrow Capitalism. Orwell was not a Marxist, but throughout his life, he sought to understand and live by Marx’s theory that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[6] I am pretty sure that Orwell would have concurred with Marx’s understanding of the role of the individual in history. Marx wrote, “Men make their history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[7]

As was said earlier Taylor’s book is a fine introduction to the literature of Orwell. D. J. Taylor is a leading scholar on Orwell, and this book is the product of decades of work on Orwell. Taylor concentrates mostly on Orwell’s literary output and focuses less on his political involvement. Orwell’s trip to Spain had an enormous impact on him, and if you want to understand the real Orwell, you have to study Orwell’s experience in Spain and his book Homage To Catalonia. This book is far more important than Animal Farm or 1984. As Taylor writes, “Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown Socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.”[8] Taylor is not a Marxist and can only offer a perfunctory analysis of Orwell’s experiences in Spain.

A closer approximation of Orwell’s time in Spain can be found in the analysis of the Marxist writer Vicky Shaw, who wrote, “Orwell’s experience was different from most other artists and intellectuals, who went to Spain as supporters of the Stalinist Communist Parties, which many still associated with Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the revolutionary traditions of October 1917 and which possessed a massive apparatus for both propaganda and direct repression of dissent. For George Orwell to produce and publish such material then was, therefore, no small task. The Kremlin bureaucracy was actively seeking the physical annihilation of the entire generation of Marxist workers and intellectuals who had made the Russian Revolution in 1917 possible, while internationally, the Communist Parties were acting as the agents of Stalin in suppressing any opposition to the bureaucracy’s interests wherever such opposition appeared. Orwell’s honest account of the Spanish events also conflicted with the reigning perceptions amongst large layers of revolutionary-minded working people.

Homage to Catalonia is, therefore, a seminal text and remains an excellent introduction to the Spanish events and the strangling of the revolution by Stalinism. However, Orwell could not elaborate on a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. Eventually, the domination of the workers’ movement by the bureaucracy, combined with the victories this gave Fascism, led him to extreme forms of political demoralisation, as is seen in his book 1984. He supported the democratic imperialist powers in the Second World War”.[9]

Taylor does not make much of Orwell’s faith in the working class. In 1984, he believed the “proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a “vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles”.

That said, Orwell never clarified his position towards the 1917 October Revolution. As Fred Mazellis correctly states, “Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for “left unity,” adapting to the Stalinists and criticising Trotsky’s merciless critique of Stalinism as “sectarian.” In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, supporting the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement.”[10]

To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As John Newsinger correctly points out, “Taylor’s achievement is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school, St Cyprian’s!”.

[1] https://orwellsociety.com/

[2] https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/

[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?2008

[4] The world economic crisis and the return of history-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/meet-f02.html 

[5] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[6] The Communist Manifesto

[7]  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[8] Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell

[9] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html

[10] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/george-orwell/

Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War, by David North- 24 September 2024, Mehring Books.

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The publication by Mehring Books of Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North is extremely prescient. The election of a fascist as president will be a trigger point for a massive escalation of the attacks on the working class.

As Joseph Kishore points out, “Trump’s reelection signifies the violent realignment of American politics with its underlying social reality: a society dominated by staggering inequality and ruled by a capitalist oligarchy. This realignment is expressed not only in Trump’s appointments but in the Democratic Party’s swift accommodation to—and even embrace of—the incoming regime. Trump is assembling a government that epitomizes the naked rule of the rich. Each appointment reflects two overriding criteria: personal loyalty to Trump and an unwavering commitment to a program of war, repression and social counterrevolution.”

This new book contains the speeches delivered at the International Committee of the Fourth International’s Online May Day celebrations from 2014 to 2024. In the foreword, King’s College historian Thomas Mackaman writes, “This volume consists principally of the speeches with which David North has opened the May Day rallies of the past ten years. Also included are essays related to the May Day events written by North. This compilation merits careful study for those who wish to understand the causes of imperialist war and how to fight it. The central theme of North’s speeches is that the struggle against militarism and war must be revolutionary, i.e., only through the overthrow of capitalism by the working class in a world socialist revolution can the drive toward catastrophe be stopped. There is no other way.”[1]

North’s use of the Marxist method is an antidote the the rubbish that has come from writers and historians over the last twenty years. The sharpest expression of this reaction came from the pen of Francis Fukuyama, whose essay entitled “The End of History?” was published in the journal The National Interest. He wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[2]

North replies, “ Fukuyama’s analysis combined bourgeois political triumphalism with extreme philosophical pessimism. It might have been appropriate for the publisher to insert in every copy of Fukuyama’s book a prescription for Prozac. If the existing capitalist reality was, for all intents and purposes, as good as it could get, mankind’s future was very bleak. But how realistic was Fukuyama’s hypothesis? Though he claimed to draw inspiration from Hegel, Fukuyama’s grasp of dialectics was extremely limited. The claim that history had ended could make sense only if it could be demonstrated that capitalism had somehow solved and overcome the internal and systemic contradictions that generated conflict and crisis.”[3]

The speeches in this volume are not just a testament to the power of the Marxist method but give us a perspective and a guide to fight. The book deserves the widest readership.

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/25/vmei-s25.html

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

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/01/unfi-a01.html

The Party is Always Right-The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism by Aidan Beatty-Pluto Press 2024

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Despite being subtitled “The Untold Story of Gerry Healy”, this book contains nothing new and is a rehash of all the old lies and slanders that have been heaped on Healy and the Trotskyist movement for decades. The historian Thomas Carlyle was fond of saying that he had to clear a large pile of dead dogs off the body of Oliver Cromwell to reach the real person underneath. The same could be said of Beatty’s book. However, once all the dead dogs have been removed from this book, all you are left with is a worthless pile of crap.

While Beatty’s book is probably his own work, Pluto Press must be held accountable for publishing this hack work. As David North writes, Beatty’s book is a political hit job, not a scholarly biography. There are many questions about the writing of this piece of hack work. There is good reason to believe that Mr. Beatty is not the sole author of this work and that he had substantial assistance in collecting this mass of odoriferous material. As it is published by Pluto Press, which is affiliated with a political tendency hostile to the International Committee, one can reasonably assume that it provided Beatty with substantial support in the “researching” and writing this volume.”

I did ask Pluto Press for a review copy and was granted one by James K, to whom I gave my address. The book never arrived. The non-arrival coincided with the publication of David North’s review on the World Socialist website.

Pluto Press, who are largely made up of renegades from Marxism, has its own axe to grind against orthodox Trotskyism. It gave free rein to the political scoundrel Paul Le Blanc to write on the back cover saying, “’Displaying scant sympathy for Gerry Healy, the substantial groups that Healy led, and the Leninist-Trotskyist traditions that Healy claimed to represent, Aidan Beatty nonetheless produces a very readable, meticulously documented take-down that will be seen as a “must-read” source on left-wing politics from the 1930s to the dawn of the twenty-first century.’

This book is so bad it is difficult to know where to start. Writing a biography is an extraordinarily complex and time-consuming event. Writing a political biography is an art form. At 148 pages long, Beatty’s piece of art barely rises above second-grade level. There are many examples of excellent biographical writing. Currently, I am reading Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell[1]. It took Crick ten years to write. Whether Crick agrees with Orwell’s politics or not, it is a superb read and deserves every plaudit it has got. Honestly, Beatty is not fit to tie Crick‘s shoelaces.

The Marxist writer David North writes, “ Historians who undertake the arduous task of writing a serious biography—among the most difficult of genres—often introduce their work with an effort to explain to their readers why they embarked on a project that usually requires years of intensive research. When the subject of study is a political figure, the interactions of the individual and the epoch in which they lived are immensely complex. There is a profound truth in the adage that a man resembles the age in which he lives more than he resembles his father. A vast amount of work is required, not to mention a command of the historical landscape and intellectual subtlety, to understand the historically conditioned personality, psychology, motivations, aims, ideals, decisions, and actions of another human being.

Whether the writers admire or despise their subject, they are still obligated to understand in historical terms the person about whom they are writing. When the author genuinely admires his subject, they must still retain a critical distance that avoids a descent into hagiography. The great biographies of political figures—Samuel Baron’s study of Plekhanov, J.P. Nettl’s two volumes on Rosa Luxemburg, and Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy—managed to maintain an objective attitude toward subjects for whom they clearly felt great empathy. Perhaps even more challenging was the task confronting Ian Kershaw, who devoted years of work to the study and explanation of the ideological, political, and psychological motivations of one of the worst mass murderers in history, Adolf Hitler.”[2]

The Psuedo Left community has welcomed Beatty’s book. Jacobin’s David Broder, from the main pseudo-left journal of the pro-genocide Democratic Party, interviewed DSA member Aidan J. Beatty. Beatty was allowed free rein to spew out his slanderous allegations against Gerry Healy and the British Trotskyists that they employed violence against political opponents and party members.

Beatty writes, “There is quite a notorious incident in 1966 when Ernie Tate, a Northern Iridefenceer of the International Marxist Group, was very violently attacked by a group of Healy’s supporters outside a party meeting in London; Healy was present for this and essentially supervised the assault. The attack was bad enough that not only was Tate hospitalized, but Healy was later forced to appear at a meeting with Isaac Deutscher and apologize. This assault was unplanned, but as I say in the book, “Healy propagated an aura of total ruthlessness but could benefit from that aura, since potential followers believed he was ruthless, in a kind of feedback loop. One former member told me that he never questioned that the party had to be structured in a very top-down, authoritarian manner because that would be needed to carry out a revolution in Britain. In general, I think many people who stuck with Healy accepted the verbal and physical abuse because they believed it was necessary to maintain discipline or because the revolution was more important than their own personal well-being.”[3]

Beatty supplies no new evidence and repeats every slanderous accusation against Healy and the SLL. David North replies to this piece of garbage history, “Libelous” is the appropriate word. Healy and the Socialist Labour League went to court to demand that two publications that had printed the allegations—Socialist Leader and Peace News—retract the story and issue a public apology to Gerry Healy. “A conscientious historian, adhering to the appropriate standards of scholarship, would have carefully researched all available sources to uncover what actually occurred in 1966. But Beatty is not a principled scholar. His book is anti-Trotskyist hack work”.[4]

Beatty’s biography relies heavily on oral history. However, his interviews are all with former members of the SLL/WRP who have personal axes to grind or are renegades from Trotskyism, such as Tariq Ali, who is an outright political scoundrel with a history of betrayal as long as my arm. Beatty’s interviews were not conducted critically, and the majority, if not all, testimonies in the book are unreliable. North says, “ The relation of the interviewee to the subject must be carefully appraised. The historian must be able to distinguish between flattery and slander, between facts and gossip, and between truth and lies. The historian must determine whether the claims of one or another interviewee are reliable, whether they are supported by evidence of a more objective character, i.e., documents”.

Suffice it to say Beatty did not ask me for an interview, which I would have refused and told him where to go. On a personal note, I joined the WRP in 1982/83. I think my probation period was nine months, a record inside the Trotskyist movement. The first few years were difficult for me, and I left just before the split occurred. I had no idea how politically sick the WRP was at the time. Perhaps the highlight was being taken to Vanessa Redgrave’s house just before the split. She was supposedly downsizing and wanted to get rid of her Library. I paid her a lot and got many books, including the proof copy of One Long Night: A Tale of Truth by Maria Joffe, translated by V. Dixon. If Mr North is reading this article, I would like to donate it to your Library where it belongs.

After the split, I joined the Minority and had the best time of my life, politically speaking. As Lenin was fond of saying, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” That is exactly what happened during the split.

I only met Healy twice. He was cordial and polite. The first time was at an international Workers’ school in Derbyshire before the split. There was a lot of confusion there, and I left early. It was probably the worst decision of my political career as I missed the opportunity to meet and talk to the international comrades from the ICFI. I heard Healy speak three times twice before the split and once after it. Despite the political degeneration that was taking place, Healy was still a fantastic speaker. To see him in his prime would have been a sight to behold. The third time I heard him was after the split. He was a broken man, both physically and politically. He was the leader of the Marxist Party, and they held a public meeting in London. The ICFI wanted to tape the meeting and had planned an intervention. During Healy’s speech, I cannot remember what he said a member of the French section of the ICFI  got up and accused Healy of capitulating to Pabloite opportunism. Suffice it to say you could have heard a pin drop. Unfortunately, my tape machine hidden inside my jacket ended, and a very audible click was heard. I was immediately manhandled out of the meeting by a phalanx of goons, and my machine was stripped of its tape. Before Professor Beatty rips this story out of context and uses it to justify his lie that Healy was a violent maniac, I would like to say that at no time in my albeit brief time in the WRP did I feel threatened or witness any violence towards me or others.

This brings me to Beatty’s motive for writing such a book. It must be said Beatty’s book is not the only diatribe written against the Trotskyist movement. Beatty’s soulmate in anti-Trotskyism is John Kelly, who is still an avowed Stalinist and has written two books recently.[5]

Beatty’s book is different in the respect that it is factionally motivated. North explains, “ What then is the connection between Beatty’s so-called Healy biography and his denunciation of the SEP and WSWS in the Epilogue? It is a dishonest attempt to link Healy’s abusive behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s to the Marxist class-based politics of the Socialist Equality Party.

Beatty writes: “The SEP has its roots in the Workers League that had once been led by Tim Wohlforth and closely influenced by Gerry Healy. Developing the ideas it learned from the WRP, the SEP’s privileging of class over all else has ended up not just downplaying race and gender, but outright sexism and racism.” [6]

North says, “By this point, the political motivations underlying Beatty’s book become all too clear. He is writing not as a historian but as a political flack for the Democratic Party. He denounces the SEP for its “ultra-leftist perspectives on current events and bad faith attacks on the recent crop of democratic socialist politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez especially, but also Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.”  What he calls “bad faith” is the well-known Marxist critique of the middle-class political agents of imperialism.

The last words of this article should be from David North. “Whatever the truth may be, one thing is certain: with the writing of this miserable book, Mr. Beatty has dealt a blow to his professional reputation from which it will never recover. Despite the tragic character of his final years, Gerry Healy will be remembered as a significant figure in the history of the British working class and the international struggle for socialism. All that he contributed to the defence of the revolutionary perspective against the betrayals and crimes of the Stalinists and social democrats over many decades will not be forgotten. But unhappily for Beatty, the fate of books and their authors are inextricably linked. The evil men write lives after them. This is the book for which Beatty will be remembered.”.

[1] George Orwell: A Life Paperback – 30 July 1992

[2] Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html

[3] The Damage Gerry Healy Wrought-Jacobin.com/2024/09/gerry-healy-trotskyism-wrp

[4] Jacobin and DSA member Aidan Beatty falsify the so-called “Tate Affair” http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/01/kifs-o01.htm

[5] See Two books by John Kelly-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/10/two-books-by-john-kelly.html

[6] The Party is Always Right-The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism page 137- https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348728/the-party-is-always-right/

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War-By Peter Stansky Stanford University Press, 2023, 150 pp

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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell

“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

George Orwell 1984

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

George Orwell

The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason, epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.

Leon Trotsky Revolution Betrayed (1936)

The essence of Marxism consists in this that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Leon Trotsky’s Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

The Socialist Patriot, published in 2023, joins an extremely busy book market on the English writer George Orwell, one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. There is no special reason for reviewing Stansky’s book other than to place it in the context of recent Orwell studies.

The majority of recent publications, it must said, have not been very good. Some have been written by paid-up members of the #MeToo movement that have been nothing short of character assassination. The attack on Orwell by Anna Funder in her book Wifedom is particularly nasty.[1] Given the caustic nature of the attack, it is not surprising that Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, took to his father’s defence in the Spring edition of the Orwell Society’s journal. In the same journal, John Rodden argues that Orwell was neither a “plagiarist” nor a “predator”. Other writers have written in defence of Orwell.

In an essay for The Article, Jeffrey Meyers defends Orwell. He relates how “In Barcelona in May 1937, the Stalinists attacked POUM, their supposed anti-fascist allies, and began a civil war within the Civil War that led to their defeat. Orwell was in the losing faction of the losing side. While he was fighting at the front, the Stalinist police searched Eileen’s hotel room. She was not arrested and hid their passports and chequebooks under the mattress while she remained in bed. Funder says Orwell “abandoned” Eileen by returning to the front, but he went to Spain to fight the fascists, not to take care of her. It is true that when he was shot through the throat, she devotedly nursed him. In July, the Stalinist secret tribunal condemned Orwell and Eileen to death for espionage and high treason, and they barely managed to escape with their lives into France.

Anna Funder, extremely imperceptive, says she’d read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) twice without realising that Eileen had been in Spain with him. Though there are in fact 37 references to Eileen in his book, Funder, determined to put a malign interpretation on everything Orwell does, states that she’s scarcely mentioned and never named and that he wrote her out of the story. She doesn’t realise that Homage is about Spain, not Eileen and that his sense of privacy and decorum prevented him from naming her. (Orwell would have been sickened by the current dedications “To my beautiful and brilliant wife” that are deleted in the post-divorce edition.)  More important, after being convicted of treason and condemned to death, he feared he could be murdered by Soviet agents whom he knew were operating in England, and wanted to protect Eileen from dangerous reprisals by hiding her connection to POUM Funder repeatedly calls his very real fear “paranoia”. But millions of people were murdered in Stalin’s Purges of 1936-38, and Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. The Communists continued to murder their enemies for the next 80 years. Recently, Sergei Skripal was poisoned in England, and Yevgeny Prigozhin was blown up for opposing the present Russian dictator.[2]

While containing biographical elements, The Socialist Patriot is more polemic than biography. Stansky is broadly politically sympathetic towards Orwell. While reading Stansky’s book, one is struck by how contemporary much of what Orwell wrote about. Room 101, Ignorance is Strength, Big Brother, and doublethink – to name but a few are Orwellian phrases instantly recognisable even today’s phrase-laden society. Despite being born over one hundred years ago, Orwell’s writing is still part of our everyday culture.

Orwell was a brilliant writer who took the study of culture very seriously and was one of many writers in the 20th century to chart its influence. Orwell had an extraordinary range. He wrote about the 19th-century British novelists Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, the American writer Henry Miller, and Donald McGill’s postcards, to name but a few. While Orwell’s Novels and cultural writings are important, I believe Orwell’s greatest book is neither Animal Farm nor 1984 but his Homage To Catalonia.

In a letter he wrote to Cyril Connolly from the hospital in Barcelona where he was being treated for a bullet wound to his throat and arm by the fascists, he wrote: “Thanks also for recently telling the public that I should probably write a book on Spain, as I shall, of course, once this bloody arm is right. I have seen wonderful things and I believe in Socialism, which I never did before. On the whole, though I am sorry not to have seen Madrid, I am glad to have been on a comparatively little-known front among Anarchists and POUM [Workers Party of Marxist Unification] people instead of in the International Brigade, as I should have been if I had come here with CP [Communist Party] credentials instead of ILP [Independent Labour Party] ones. “[3]

In Another letter to his publisher, Victor Gollancz On 1 May 1937, he wrote “ I shall be going back to the front probably in a few days & barring accidents I expect to be there till about August. After that, I think I shall come home, as it will be about time I started on another book. I greatly hope I come out of this alive, if only to write a book about it. It is not easy here to get hold of any facts outside the circle of one’s own experience, but with that limitation, I have seen a great deal that is of immense interest to me. Owing partly to an accident, I joined the POUM militia instead of the International Brigade, one which was a pity in one way because it meant that I had never seen the Madrid front; on the other hand, it has brought me into contact with Spaniards rather than Englishmen & especially with genuine revolutionaries. I hope I shall get a chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies – more, I can’t say, owing to the censorship. If I can get back in August I hope to have a book ready for you about the beginning of next year.[4]

After Orwell returned from Spain, he elaborated his commitment to Socialism by writing the essay/pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius. Orwell’s essay was not just a knee-jerk reaction to the war. Gregory Claeys writes, “Before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell had briefly suggested three of its central themes: first, patriotism was not inherently conservative or reactionary, but might be expressed as a legitimate sentiment among those on the left; second, patriotism alone would not prevent England’s defeat, but instead the social revolution must progress (and here his Spanish ideals were carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that it was those who were most patriotic who were least likely to “flinch from revolution when the moment comes.” John Cornford, a Communist killed while serving in the International Brigades, had been “public school to the core.” This proved, Orwell thought, that one kind of loyalty could transmute itself into another and that it was necessary for the coming struggle to recognise “the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues.”[5]

Orwell is crystal clear that the only way to beat the fascists was for the working class to make the war a revolutionary one. He writes, “It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting; it means a fundamental power shift. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. Ordinary people want a conscious, open revolt against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure from below, we shall get the government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right through our national life, we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have to break the grip of the monied class. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its destiny.”

Stansky spends a fair amount of time and space writing about Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn essay. It is then all the more bizarre that he could conclude on page 73 of his book that Orwell disdained theory and had an empirical outlook. He further elaborates that Orwell was part of an unbroken radical tradition. This is a line that is perpetrated by the Pseudo Lefts, who see the working class as inherently radical and in no need of a revolutionary perspective. It must be said that the paragraph looks out of place from the rest of the book. It seems like another writer might have inserted it.

Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. Orwell’s Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal Farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, “The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state”.

Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refuted this slander saying, “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…I was trying to say, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”

Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, “In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky’s Life of Stalin (1941): “I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin’s childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin” by Stalin. The earlier parts were “particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky’s assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book.”

Remarkably, the political discussion over Orwell’s opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the Uk Socialist Equality Party,[6] a member of the audience used Orwell’s book Animal Farm to conclude that revolutions have always been defeated. In his reply, Chris Marsden said that despite Orwell being a brilliant writer and an opponent of Stalinism, he nonetheless drew pessimistic conclusions from the victory of Stalinism in the former USSR. One example of this confusion was his turning over some 35 of these names, a year before he died in 1950, to a secret government unit called the Information Research Department. This arm of the British Foreign Office had been set up to organise anti-Soviet and anticommunist propaganda.

Marsden made the point that The co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposiiton opposed Stalinism from the standpoint of Marxism and had faith in the working class overthrowing it. They worked under extraordinary political and physical pressure to provide a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, something Orwell could never have done.

As the Marxist writer Fred Mazelis wrote, “The Trotskyists showed that there was a socialist alternative to Stalinism and that the bourgeois-democratic regimes headed by Churchill and Roosevelt, the same regimes which praised the Soviet government at the time of the Moscow Trials and were its allies during WWII, and whose predecessors had intervened to destroy the Russian Revolution, were no defenders of democracy at all. Those who today praise Orwell as a solitary opponent of Stalinist are the same ones who deliberately censor any mention of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.”

Notes

A Link to the Debate over Animal Farm.

@sep_uk

“But won’t this just be another Animal Farm?” The reports delivered to the Socialist Equality Party general election rally in Holborn and St Pancras provoked an important discussion, centred on why there were not more socialists and wouldn’t there be a degeneration of any socialist government. This raised an important discussion on Stalinism, which was warmly received. #GazaGenocide #GeneralElection #socialism #AnimalFarm

♬ original sound – SEP

[1] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html

[2] In defence of George Orwell- https://www.thearticle.com/in-defence-of-george-orwell

[3] The Collected Non-Fiction: Essays, Articles, Diaries and Letters, 1903-1950

[4] Orwell in Spain-by George Orwell- bookreadfree.com/412706/10147298

[5] “The Lion and the Unicorn”, Patriotism, and Orwell’s Politics-Gregory Claeys-The Review of Politics-Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 186-211

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/01/dmho-j01.html

Diary of a Nobody

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Current Work

I am working on a review of George Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp. There are several new books on Orwell out now, so I will be kept busy doing reviews. I have paid primary visits to the archives of George Orwell held at UCL, and Bernard Crick’s archive is at Birkbeck.

Three long-term projects are the books. I will update the collection of the Why I Write series that is already in eBook form on Amazon. I want to add some more writers to a new version. The second will be a collection of essays on the historian Raphael Samuel. The third will be a short book or long essay on Oliver Cromwell and the Putney Debates. Cromwell was the subject of my car crash 2003 dissertation for my BA History at Birkbeck.

I will write a short letter to the London Review of Books. It published a terrible letter from B. Letzler called The Shoah after Gaza. He managed to call Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side  “Dud”

Recent Book Purchases

  1. The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes. I have written previously on this subject.
  2. Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan. An extraordinary book well researched on the disappeared children and coercive adoptions in Guatemala.
  3. Cancion by Eduardo Halfon
  4. The Great Revolutions by Duncan Hallas. I fine SWP tradition seems to concentrate on What happened rather than why.
  5. The Blazing World by J Healey. This is the paperback version. I have been meaning to get around to reviewing this for ages.
  6. Travellers of the World Revolution by B Studer, Verso
  7. Marxism and the English Revolution by John Rees. This has not been released yet. I will get a review copy, hopefully.

Recent Events

I regularly attend the online SEP Postal Workers Committee. I follow their work closely and their stuff on the Post is way better than I can write. They write about it. I work it. A good combination.

I have started to watch a few episodes of Sky’s Royal Kill List. What a terrible piece of television. If there was a historian consulted on this programme, he should share the same fate as Charles 1st. When a series has so much swearing, it has very little to say and even less history.

Interview with David Unger- Author of Jose Feeds the World

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Q.How did you get involved in the project of José Feeds the World?

A. I’ve been friends with Mauricio Velázquez, the publisher of Duopress, for over 20 years. Mauricio is a Mexican national who has been living in the U.S. for maybe 25 years and worked previously as an editor for Rosen Publishers. In the fall of 2022, knowing of my previous children’s books, he asked me if I would be interested in writing a non-fiction book about Chef José Andrés. Since I was familiar with the chef and the amazing work of his World Central Kitchen, I jumped at the chance. Mauricio offered valuable editorial comments, but basically he allowed me to craft my own book. It has been an amazing experience.

Q. How different is writing a children’s book than one with more adult themes.

A I published La Casita, my first children’s book in 2012, and I have published four other kid’s books since then. What you might not know, Keith, is that I have translated 8 children’s books, including three by Guatemalan Nobelist Rigoberta Menchú, for the Canadian publisher Groundwood Books. Through this translation work, I went through a kind of apprenticeship. Obviously writing children’s books requires a different skill set than writing adult fiction. In all my work, I have been interested in how characters adjust and change, and how experience transforms their lives—this obsession is imbedded in me…It also helps that I have three daughters and five grandchildren.

Q.What was the relationship between you and Marta? Did the illustrations come first or did the words.

A. I was familiar with the children’s books that Marta did for Source Books, now the parent company of Duopress. Her illustrations for the books The Girl Who Heard the Music, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady really impressed me: they are lyrical, expansive and very child oriented. I wrote the text and I was overjoyed when Mauricio said that Marta, who comes from a village close to Jose Andres’s birthplace, WANTED to illustrate my book, for obvious reasons. I am the beneficiary of her amazing talent.

Q. I can see on Facebook you have already taken the book into schools etc. How has it been received both in schools and in the media. 

A.It has been a wonderful experience to present the book, primarily in book store presentations. There is nothing greater than feeling the enthusiasm of young readers—their responses are always uncensored and quite electric. Younger kids respond more to the illustrations, but 7- and 8-year-olds understand the narrative that Marta has illustrated and ask quite interesting questions.

 Q.what are you working on now? Do you plan any more collaborations with Marta?

A.I have written a couple of other children’s book texts, but haven’t found a publisher. I would love to collaborate with Marta or with Marcela Calderón, the illustrator of my previous kid’s book called Topo pecoso/Moley Mole. Both are so talented, but publishers decide what is printed and who illustrates text.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – May 5 1992

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 “It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents, I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”

F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”

The Great Gatsby

“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment and worthwhile.”

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.

As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as there ever has been”.

The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146 pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first part of the 20th century.

 As Walsh writes, “ A novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and subsequent developments.”[1]

Fitzgerald’s very subtle hints about the racist and fascist outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like a bombshell.  One example is when Tom Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires, “by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”Fitzgeralds’ fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote “Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in the Islamic World.”

Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to “We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp the degree to which he knew his way around these issues.

The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line that could describe America’s ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/14/grea-m14.html