“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams
“move fast and break things”
Mark Zuckerberg
I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.
Walt Whitman- Democracy
“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”
WSWS Editorial Board Statement
To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.
Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.
Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her… But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]
The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]
Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]
This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg’s Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams’s book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.
Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]
Wynn Williams’s book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.
(This is a loosely edited transcript of the above book event. This transcript was done by Christopher Thompson. I include in this publication some comments made by Thompson.)
Houseman’s Thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks for giving up your Saturday night. We are joined today by Michael Braddock, who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, which is out now from Verso. Braddick has written many books before, including a biography of John Lilburn, Common Freedom of the People. God’s fury, England’s fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the Politics of Getting Things Done. What drove his work? What motivated? And also, I suppose, what motivated you to write his biography? Thanks.
Braddick: Can I just say thanks so much to you for your interest in Hill and for giving up your Saturday night to come and hear about him? So Chris Hill was born in 1912 in York, son of a very prosperous solicitor, and brought up a believing and devout Methodist with the extreme principled view that you should have serious thoughts about the world, and you should act on them to make the world a better place. And that was one of his first important intellectual inheritances, I think, because he lost his faith in the thirties, but he retained that seriousness about living an examined life, leading a life that was serious about how the world could be better and trying to act on that. Although he did spend a lot of time pondering how he could act helpfully in the world.
He lost his faith and gained his Marxism in a process that’s not very clear. But he became a convinced Marxist while an undergraduate at Oxford, and he graduated in 1934. Should know that. But didn’t join the communist party immediately. He had reservations about the communist party strategy.
He went to the Soviet Union between 1934-36 and came back convinced that he should join the communist party, partly because of what he’d seen in the Soviet Union and partly because the CBGB had changed its political strategy in a way that made it an easier party home for him. He remained a member of the CPGB for nearly twenty years. He left in nineteen fifty-six, fifty-seven. Prompted not by the invasion of Hungary, but by the refusal of the party to allow free internal discussion of the invasion of Hungary. It was he who left on the point of inner party democracy.
And the second part of that was that he didn’t think the party had allowed them to discuss the implications of Khrushchev’s secret speech, which had been made in secret but published by the CIA quite widely. Both of which made him think that the communists had been misled by the party, had been misinformed by the party, and that the daily work of the party’s paper had deliberately suppressed information that was critical of the Stalinist line. So I laid it at that point because he was an intellectual Marxist and a communist, but he was a communist only for those twenty years. And it was a political strategy that he took up in ’36, and he dropped it in ’57. And it’s a distinction that isn’t much honoured in liberal commentary on Hill.
He’s routinely referred to interchangeably as a communist or a Marxist, but his membership of the party was a strategy. And understanding why he took it on and left it is important for understanding his politics. By the time he left the party in ’57, he’d been a fellow of Oxford College. He went to Balliol in 1931 and left in 1978. Not a standard Marxist career.
He had two years in Cardiff in the late 1930s. He had four years, I think, of military service. But he was in Balliol for his whole life. Down to ’56 and ’57, he’d been doing a lot of work for the party, a lot of publication for the party and party, for explaining Marxism, setting out what a Marxist history might look like. And also, I’m sorry, write or I’m sorry, writing apologies for Stalinist, Russia and Stalinist policies.
Out of the party, he then pursued a freer career, I think, an intellectually freer career to pursue the implications of his intellectual Marxism. Having dropped the political strategy of the CBGB, he was freer to explore the implications of Marxism for his understanding of the world. And there, I got very interested in the relationship between the British left and the British past, and how, at each phase of his writing career, you can see him in dialogue with the contemporary world, trying to understand the past for the present that would equip us better for the future. And in the forties and fifties, that was mainly about the state and reform of the state and political economy. In the early sixties, it was about science and progress, how progressive ideas, but particularly scientific ideas, could be set free.
That’s a lot to unpack there, but he did think of politically progressive ideas as scientific in the same way that an understanding of the natural world could be scientific. So he had a view of, you know, scientific progress in the early sixties. Sixties. In the late sixties, he was master of writing, letters to the undergraduates to explain why they couldn’t have a condom machine in the college, while writing the world turned upside down, this glorious celebration of personal freedom and personal liberation. So in the late sixties, he was very interested in the possibilities of personal liberation from a Marxist perspective.
And then in the eighties, he wrote about the experience of defeat as the shadow of Thatcherism came to lie over the aspirations he’d been pursuing really for a whole political career. He began to write about seventeenth-century radicals and their experience in the Restoration. What is it like when the world turns against you, and what do you do about your ideals, and how do you nurture them and keep them alive for better times? So, it’s an interesting life in several ways. And there is that paradox I kind of alluded to, the difficulty of reconciling a life as a fairly, you know, well, as a very assiduous Oxford Tutor, undistinguishable, really, in his practice from his liberal colleagues in Oxford.
Braddick: He behaved as an Oxford Tutor was expected to do. And then as a master of a college, balancing and representing all the interests in a relatively conservative institution. And doing all that while pursuing this radical career in writing. And one final thought about life is, as I said at the very start, he became a convinced Marxist, also carrying from his Methodism a view that you should act on your beliefs to improve the world. And the way he thought he could do that was by writing.
Writing was for him a way of improving the world, equipping people with a different past to give them a different sense of the present and a different idea about the possibilities of the future. That’s what he thought he could contribute to the improvement of society. And he wrote to the communist party leadership, I think, in 1949, saying, I know this is a smallish backwater of activity, but it’s the one where I can make a difference. And he juxtaposed it directly with what he’d done leafleting at the factory gate, campaigning and by-elections and so on. But he felt that, as a posh guy with a posh Oxford accent, what he could do for the movement was to develop a radical past on which people could draw in thinking about the present and charting a radical future.
You’ve kind of mentioned that, you know, to suppose about what drew him to history in the English past, but why, particularly, was the English Revolution? What was it about the English Revolution that appealed to him? And how did his, you know, how did his kind of communism and his Marxism affect how he viewed that particular struggle, particularly in that early period? Yeah. So I think it was taken for granted at the time, and he used the term, ironically, that England was the top nation until the First World War.
Bradick: And the understanding that was to understand the first bourgeois state, the state that had the first bourgeois revolution, the first industrial revolution, the first urbanized mass society. So it wasn’t a sort of little Englander patriotism that made him concentrate on England. It was thought that it was the first bourgeois society, and understanding how the first bourgeois society evolved and came about and became supported by, you know, all the structures that support a bourgeois society. You were learning something important for the history of the whole globe. And so he spent a lot of time arguing that the seventeenth-century crisis in England was a bourgeois revolution, and a precursor to the better-known bourgeois revolution in France.
And that was one of his major academic concerns was to establish the view that we should view the seventeenth-century crisis as a bourgeois revolution. Why did he do that’s one set of one kind of answer to your question, but another one is that his departure from Methodism was associated with a strong view that bourgeois culture was experiencing its death throes. And, if you wanted to understand what would come next, you needed to understand the birth of bourgeois culture. And he understood that not just as the institutions of economy and society, but also the way that bourgeois culture shapes the family, shapes the transmission of property, gives us, social roles that are necessary to sustain the structures of a bourgeois life and how those bourgeois expectations of us as individuals are ultimately really constraining. They’re inventions of the human mind, but we experience them as cages.
And he felt a deep sense of personal alienation in the 1930s. So there are these various ways in which you wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois alienation from ourselves, bourgeois structures, the behaviour of bourgeois states only fifteen, twenty years after the war to end all wars were about to pitch, obviously, on route to yet another one that would be even more destructive and awful. And it was the madness of bourgeois civilization in the thirties and its dissatisfactions that made him interested in the origin interested in the origins of bourgeois society, and he thought they lay in England in the seventeenth century. So it mustn’t be a kind of narrow patriotism. It’s a real thought that, for this for that question, England was the place to study.
That, you know, if you’re looking at the kind of origins of the bourgeois British state, British society, that’s very different from what I think most people, if they’ve approached Hill. They’ve approached the world, and the world has turned upside down. Here’s a kind of great book on, from the late sixties. Is that right? Seventy-two.
Seventy and, you know, which looks at the kind of bubbling undercurrents of radicalism, religious, political, social, yeah. In that revolutionary moment, you know, the moment that kind of bourgeois England emerges, there’s also this kind of undercurrent. You know, what drew him to that? And, you know, what were the conclusions that he drew from it? Did that change his view of the revolution generally or of the kind of that period?
Braddick: Well, it so here’s a problem for the biographer. He never said. And when he did, I’m fairly sure that he weeded out his papers. I think I know that he weeded out his papers and didn’t want people like me, you know, poring over them after he’d gone. So there’s a difficulty in actually answering the question, but the the reconstruction I do in the book is to say that he had always been interested in personal liberation and alienation and his Marxism was ultimately a humanist Marxism about how a fairer society would set us free as individuals to flourish in ways that are healthier than are demanded by a bourgeois society.
So I think that had been his concern from very early on, but he didn’t get around to writing it because he got sidetracked into explaining the origins of the bourgeois revolution in England, which I think was not in retrospect where his interest lay, but it was critical to his heart the whole architecture of his life that there was a bourgeois revolution. And so, World Turned Upside Down is now his most-read book, but in the eighties, probably his most influential book. Well, no. This isn’t quite true, but as influential in the eighties was a book called The Century of Revolution, published in 1961, which set out the case for the bourgeois revolution in the whole cultural sense. So, I think he turned he turned to, and the world turned upside down.
And in the early seventies, he was commissioned to write that book. There are there was an enterprising publisher behind it. But I think it allowed him to say something that had been on his mind, really, for forty years. And another interesting point in writing the biography rather than just the history of his work is that in those years, that was the high point of student rebellion in Oxford. And he was in his day job having to deal with radical figures including Alex Callinicos who, Edward Heath visited the college, and Callinicos and Simon Sedgwick Gell were now allowed to say, I think, I’m being recorded, Allegedly, allegedly, two people went into the common room where Ted Heath was going to be entertained and wrote fuck Heath on the wall, you know.
And they were sent down and so on. So, he was dealing with this and occupations and rent strikes. So, radicalism in Oxford was pale back in Paris with Exeter and Essex, and certainly LSE and pale by comparison to Paris. But still, as the head of the college, he had to deal with this. And, it’s very interesting that in his day job, he was kinda holding the line for college respectability and saying you really mustn’t say rude words about the prime minister while he was writing The World Turned Upside Down.
And literally, there was a fantastic exchange over the condom machine that the students had installed without the permission of the senior members of the college. And the senior members then said, You’ve got to take it out because it’s an offense to our moral sensibilities. And anyway, you can buy condoms in Norwich now, it’s not very far to travel. And the students took it. And anyway, it had to be, they said we can take it down, but the London Rubber Company can’t come and collect it for a while.
And they said, right. We’ll take it, and it will go in the dean’s room until the London Rubber Company can collect it. And Dean and Hill had to represent all this with a straight face, saying, you know, it’s a moral offense to some members of the college to have a condom machine. They’re available elsewhere. And on the other hand, he’s writing the world turned upside down, which is all about this tremendous effusion of sexual and other forms of personal liberation.
And, it was dramatized on the South Bank by Keith Dewhurst as an, you know, example of radical theatre and theatre that could change the world. And it was put on by a company that was famous for living a, you know, a liberated life and, allegedly. And so Hill was completely in favour of all this liberation. Although I think he thought, you know, some student politics were a bit, you know, tokenistic and gestural politics rather than substantial politics. But basically, he was behind it all.
But in his day job, he was having to maintain the respectable front. And I think it’s critical to his personality that he did it. He felt, I, you know, I have this duty. This is my role. This is my job.
It’s not me. It’s the job I have to do. But really, there’s a me off stage that’s interested in all this liberation stuff. Yeah. Sorry.
Very long rambling. No. No. That was fascinating. I think, you know, I think it’s a testament also to the book itself.
So your chapter on Balliol. I didn’t think I’d be so interested in the internal politics of Balliol, your college, but it Yeah. You know, it is kind of fascinating and shows a lot about Hill as a person as well as a writer. I think you get from that. I also wanted to ask about, you know, he left the communist party in ’57.
Braddick: Yeah. Not with some of the others, EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and others who left the year before, directly after or around the events of Hungary. This was about inner party democracy. It was a year later at the special congress, right, in ’57, that he left. I was quite in quite involved, right, with the congress held internally at the communist party about the question of democracy.
Right? But before that, he was very involved with the communist party historians’ group. Yeah. I want to ask about you know, this is an incredible collection of historians who shaped the study and the writing of history in mid-century Britain. Ralph O Samuel, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Yeah. Chris Piel and others, and many others. You know, what was it about the communist party that, you know, first of all, kind of nurtured or allowed these historians, right? But what also what did their what did those historians get from both the group of historians around the communist party, or the communist party itself?
Braddick: Yeah.
The party had turned in the late thirties to a kind of Popular Front strategy that they should build a progressive alliance for change and abandon a kind of class-based conflict. And the only way to achieve change was through class conflict. And what it allowed us to do was build a progressive alliance alongside the core revolutionary ambition. And it trended towards a ref a reformist ambition. And that made it easier for intellectuals.
And so in the late thirties, Margot Heinemann has a very nice chapter on this. The communist party developed a culture strategy, radio, TV in the post-war period, drama, art, visual art, literature, and history to try to build a progressive consciousness and to give people resources to develop a progressive consciousness. And so there is a relatively free hand then for writers and artists to pursue their creative individualism within the service of the party. It was a very creative moment, and some great writing and great history came out of it. And so there’s a cultural committee, and then the culture committee had us, effectively a subcommittee, the historians group.
And the historians group was set up with two aims in mind. One was that AL Morton had written a classic history of the people’s history of England, and it was being revised. And the party wanted to give him advice on how to revise it. And the second thing was that Hill had written in 1940 a kind of manifesto for his view of a bourgeois revolution that had caused controversy about whether it was properly Marxist or not. And so the second focus was to discuss whether Hill’s account of the bourgeois revolution was properly Marxist. And it sounds, you know, terribly sort of restrictive thing, you know, as if the dogma is going to be imposed. But actually, it was an open question about how Marxists should think about the bourgeois revolution and how Marxists should think about sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century England. And it attracted a generation of people who were turned off by an extremely conservative university curriculum and school curriculum that was the story of kings and queens and the doings of great men and, had a kind of liberal continuity to it, that nothing ever unpleasant had happened in Britain, and no change had ever required any unpleasantness. And, we’re not like the foreigners. So there was this attempt to recover a kind of radical history of the British past and the way that ordinary people had shaped the conditions of their lives and how understanding the radicalism of ordinary people would help you understand the British past, but it also give the radicalism of ordinary people a present and a future.
So there was a kind of progressive ambition behind it. But it was quite an open-ended, quite open. And the key thing for the party, I don’t know if you were going to ask me about this, the party regarded such issues through the lens of democratic centralism. The idea being that you had a democratic discussion until a line was reached, and then the line became the line, and you fell in line with the party line. And on all these issues, rigorous debate was thought necessary so that the party could develop a line.
So that lots of people misunderstand, I think, the role of the party here. They think the party was commissioning a history from these people. But actually, the party was trying to foster a debate about Marxists that would lead to a line that the party could then adopt. And democratic centralism was exactly the issue in ’57. And, you know, we’ll talk about that later, I suppose.
But in the early post-war period, it was giving these people a lot of freedom to think about how they might reconfigure an understanding of the British past. But they were very concerned that it should meet academic standards. It wasn’t simply party-political history. It was that it should be rigorous history, better than liberal history, living by academic standards more rigorously than liberal history, and thus be better history and give a good basis on which Marxists could think about the present and the future.
You’ve kind of alluded already to his influence, particularly in the kind of sixties and seventies, right? You know, he was you know, there were plays put on of his history books, you know, his books were taught widely across the curriculum. I think at a kind of level, looked at, you know, the three universities were kind of the defining or one of the defining kinds of interpretations of the English revolution at the time. And what was that like for him to be, you know, he was a very private man. He was very kind, you know, he was, you say quite shy, quiet, you know, he wasn’t, very false. What was it like for him to have been this?
And, also, I suppose, what was it like culturally to have this kind of, you know, the dominant narrative of this pivotal moment in history to be one that was explicitly a Marxist reading?
Braddick: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was extremely private and modest, and I think he felt he was putting himself at the service of his readers. You know?
I’m, you know, I don’t think he, I don’t think there was much ego involved in being such a big figure for him. I think it was that he, you know, I’m being of help here. And that was important for him because he wanted to be helpful, and he came from a family of Methodist activists in York. Some of whom had been very active in charity. You know, we might think of their activism differently now, but the missionaries and some people wanted to change the world.
So I think it was really important for him to feel useful in the world, and I think he took that seriously, took that responsibility seriously. And I think it was also a tremendous relief because in the early fifties, in particular, well, in the late thirties and then again in the early fifties, communists found it very hard. Communist men party members and Marxists at large found it very hard to get university employment. And several people had jobs and lost them, and it was thought to be political. And Hill was always on their side.
And he said to one confidant in the fifties that he or in the sixties that he only kept his job because Balliol, you know, Balliol just doesn’t care what the outside world thinks. You know, he’s one of our chaps. So, he benefited from Oxford’s privilege, and I think he took all that quite seriously. And at the very end of his career, he worked in the Open University, where lots of former comrades had ended up because they had been pushed out of universities in the fifties. They’d gone into adult education, gone into the Workers’ Education Authority, and that had been the obvious place to recruit people for the OU in the seventies.
And so the CPGB was reunited, really, in the Open University in the eighties. But there were very few. Kiernan wrote to him. Kiernan had a job in Edinburgh, but Kiernan wrote to him saying there’s no point in going for x or y job because, you know and and Rodney Hilton or Hill’s very first article was published under a pseudonym. And Hilton said that was because if you knew this was in ’38. And Hilton said if he’d published this with his name on that would have, you know, it would have been a serious problem for his career.
That’s when he first set out a Marxist interpretation of the seventeenth century. So he was, I think, conscious of his privilege and anxious that he should make that privilege a benefit to other people. And he wrote letters. I can’t remember who it was, but he wrote in defence of someone who’d lost a job. I think it might have been that Arblaster was not given a job at Manchester, having been there for two years.
I think it was Anthony Arblaster. But he anyway, he wrote to him and said no. I remember writing this. I’ll just tell you what he says. He says, it’s outrageous that a heretic should be debarred from doing their job because of their heresy alone.
You know, show me that by being a heretic, I’m doing the job badly, then you’ve got a case. But you cannot dismiss people simply for their heresy. And I think he felt tremendously protected, and he felt a real responsibility to the wider movement, as, you know, the guy in a position. Yeah. He goes in the seventies from that, you know, position of, you know, being at the top of his field.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So, I think there is a generational effect in history writing.
Each generation does better work than its predecessor, and that is certainly true that Hill, and particularly his economic history, doesn’t cut the mustard anymore, you know, and you wouldn’t do economic history the way Hill did it. So, for a long time, it was difficult to say that sort of thing without being identified with a political program against the kind of history he was trying to promote. So, one aim of the book is to try to disentangle history from politics. And my view is that, you know, if history is simply writing your politics, why do history? Why not just state your political position?
And if history isn’t a test of your politics and isn’t making you think and examine your politics, then there’s no point in doing it. But in the eighties, I talked about the Education Act and the national curriculum and how the battles over that were directed particularly against this progressive history, and people should be taught the greatness of Britain. And, you know, all this nonsense about slavery, we should forget about that and talk about democracy instead. In the national curriculum, the national curriculum was forming people for the next stage. So, it’s exactly the politics that he’d set out to challenge.
And he was at the heart of those political debates, saying, Mrs Thatcher knows nothing about history. You know, this is just, authoritarian state trying to input trying to mark its homework. But at the same time, people who were actually on the left and quite sympathetic to left-wing causes were saying, you know, some of these books don’t work very well, and we should be doing this work differently and a bit better. So, at the time and coming back to what I said to start with in ’81, when I started, I was confronted with this, and I couldn’t unpick what was going on here. Whether I was being told Hill was wrong because I was being taught by Thatcherites, or am I being told that Hill is wrong because you can do this another way better?
And that’s but it it it so that’s sort of a personal way of putting it. But what happened to him in the eighties was that he became conflated with a general attack on leftism and progressivism, the values of the sixties, the world turned upside down, and dismissals of Israel did come from there. But also, from a, you know, academic critique that we should do this differently and better. Yeah. I always find it interesting that Hill was the one who kind of bore the brunt of that.
Yeah. Whereas someone like Hobsbawm, who remained in the party, never you know, there was you know, it was very much kind of still accepted. There still is, I think, in the kind of establishment, yeah. In a different way. Yeah.
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know. I know I’m going to name drop here. I know Sir Keith Thomas a bit. And I didn’t realize there was a higher honour than being Sir Keith Thomas, but in fact, there is, as being a companion of honour.
And I knew it because Keith Thomas became the companion of honour at the same time that Elton John did. And then Hobsbawm was a companion of honour. You know, it’s the highest thing the establishment can do for you. And I find I do find it hard to judge because one of the things that got him in trouble was that he never although he said to the party, I’m renouncing Stalinism, and I’m not renouncing you because you’re Stalinist, he would give comfort to the capitalist press by saying it to the capitalist press. He would never sell out his former comrades by doing it in public.
So he had this repentance, but it was a quiet repentance. And he was beaten with that through the eighties and nineties. Unrepentant Stalinist, you know. Ferdinand Mount said, having an unrepentant Stalinist as Master of Balliol, you might as well have a recently convicted paedophile. He said that you know.
And he wasn’t an unrepentant Stalinist either. And somehow, Hobsbawm escaped that. Hobsbawm stayed in the party. He was, I don’t know, quite how he did it, except that he’s less concerned with the national story. Yeah.
He’s not in those national curriculum debates. He talks about Europe in his early career, then he’s a global historian. It’s less offensive to an establishment view of the British character, yeah. Then Christopher Hill said, you know, it hasn’t always been, respectful and deferential and, you know, and people haven’t always just abided by the rules of the game that they’re given. And I suppose by undercutting the story of the English revolution, you are implicitly or explicitly even kind of undercutting the story of the British establishment.
Now this is, you know, this is the kind of start of where we are now. There’s something kind of by going directly there, you’re kind of going to the roots of this. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
So this is my kind of interest actually, but the eleven years in the post-Roman history of Britain, where we had a republic, and we call it the interregnum, the period between kings. And it ends in a restoration, although what was restored was nothing like what had been overthrown. So, there’s this meta-narrative that’s just kind of drilled into us by the very naming of the events. And, to undercut that is to undercut the position of the establishment, I think. So, I think he’ll, I mean, he probably couldn’t have complained actually because he wanted to undercut.
He wanted to be a threat to the establishment. He wanted his writing to destabilize these comforting stories. But then in the end, you know, when the boot was firmly on that foot, I mean, he did suffer, I think. So I think, you know, if he kind of suffered that kind of revisionist moment, seems we’re in a different moment now both I mean, politically, may maybe not actually, but intellectually in terms of the study of English revolution, I think we’re in a very different moment now particularly than the eighties and nineties where it was at its kind of peak. Yeah.
And I think that was a factor in you coming to this book now? And also, I suppose, how is and how should we think about Hill’s work today? You know, how is it received in the field, and how should we, as kind of general readers, or how should we approach Hill’s work?
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know Chris Hill, but I’m no Chris Hill.
Whatever that John f Kennedy quote is. I mean, I wouldn’t compare myself to it at all, but in terms of, you know, importance or influence. But I do want to try to get a post-hill story going about the English revolution because for forty years students have been taught not that, not that, not that, not that. And I sense an appetite among the students I teach, not many nowadays, but for a more constructive, progressive engagement with the seventeenth century and the events of the seventeenth century. So I think there’s a moment coming.
I don’t think I’m not sure I can deliver. I can pose the question, I hope, about what we should say about all this. I am writing a book about the 1650s, and I’m in Oxford. Normally, I suppose.
But, I taught a graduate class in Oxford this year on the Marxist historians, and there’s an appetite among graduate historians. One of the students said to me, we’re the generation of no alternative, you know, and they’re looking back to this generation of progressive thinkers, not just in, history, but, you know, progressive art and they’ve they’re interested in Frankfurt School and how you can have an authentic culture that’s not just, commercial stuff squirted down the Internet at you. And they’re returning to Hill more than the new left, actually, interestingly. But Hill and Hobsbawm, Thompson in particular, are fascinated by it. I realize I’ve written about the wrong Marxist historian.
But there, they’re looking for inspiration not to reproduce and recapture that moment, but for inspiration that might lead them to the birth of a new moment. And I feel we desperately need it, you know. The left hasn’t had a game to put up against the rise of the light. And yeah. So, I think that there’s an appetite for it.
And the English Revolution. Historical consciousness about the English Revolution could be part of that. But I’m afraid I know, it’s beyond me to provide it. I’m afraid. Yeah. But I do hope that, you know, this brings people to heal to the question and prompts people to think about what the new line new hope could be.
I was thinking about this, particularly this kind of political moment and the political moments that you say he was kind of responding in his work to this political moment. My favourite work of Hill’s is the experience of defeat. Yeah. You know, which I think sadly feels very, very kind of relevant again now. You know, it’s about the kind of experience of Milton and other revolutionaries after the Restoration.
You know, what happened to them? I don’t want to ask you necessarily about that, but do you have a favourite work of Hill’s? What is the one that you would know, you want to return to if you still feel the kind of pull?
Braddick: I’ve become so, I would like to say about that, though. He, Bunyan, was really important to Hill very early in life, and it comes from his Methodism.
And there’s a lot of fair talk about in a book in the media, as the war was breaking out. And he wrote love letters daily to a woman from the barracks, and they’re very moving. And they reveal a lot about his views on love, marriage, authenticity, sex, and politics. Because she was a liberal, he kept correcting her politics. Marriage didn’t laugh.
But overshadowing him was the thought that he was going to die. And he reached Bunyan in that moment, too. And the thing in Bunyan he drew on was, he said it then, and he said it again in the eighties. We dare not despair. We betray our ideals.
We betray our ideals if we despair. So the one thing we must not do is despair, and it’s struggle which will keep the faith alive and keep the ideals alive. So all that is, I was going to use the word elegiac for that, but it’s very it’s poignant, isn’t it? And it’s about his own experience and so on. But there is at the core of it this thing, okay, young uns, the one thing you mustn’t do is despair.
Yeah. My favourite book, I’ve become very interested in, he actually, this is relevant to his affair with Sheila Grant Duff, who was very conventionally bourgeois and thought that since she was in love with another man as well as Hill, she shouldn’t sleep with Hill. And Hill thought she shouldn’t be hung up on these bourgeois values, and he didn’t mind. So he urged on her the importance of leaving Andrew Marvel’s ode to his coy mistress, you know, with the thought that they were going to die. And, you know, why give in to these bourgeois values?
You know, we must run before the sun. But it made me very interested because he said it was that poetry that first led him to the English Revolution. It’s people living in a society, whose values they feel uncomfortable with. And I like that writing of his. He read at the time he read T.S. Eliot in particular, and Eliot was expressing the sense of personal alienation that you have to live within these bourgeois expectations, and they do violence to who you are. And Hill got very interested in that dynamic in seventeenth-century literature. And so I like the Milton book, because he’s talking about the conflicts that Milton feels, in the society in which he’s required to live and how that does violence to who he is. I don’t know if that’s my time of life, but I’ve been more drawn to that kind of he. he was interested in what’s often said about him is that he’s a determinist and he’s not interested in people, but it’s untrue.
You know, he’s very interested in the experience people have of dislocation from that society. And that’s the writing I’ve become more interested in. I, ironically enough, started my career writing about the state and transformation and so on. And I’ve ended up writing a biography, and it’s similar. Hill got more interested in subjectivity, I think, and the conflicted subjectivities we have as a result of the structures in which we live. So that’s my answer.
Yeah. That’s a great answer. I think you’ve probably been talking enough.
Comment by Christopher Thompson
I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick’s interview at Housman’s Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill’s beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of ‘revisionism’ in early to mid-17th-century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. The criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late 1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Russell’s essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976, as was John Morrill’s book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe’s edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977, respectively. One of Lawrence Stone’s most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time told me relatively recently that Stone had been unaware – ‘blindsided’ was his word – by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill’s case, despite the origins of ‘revisionism’ amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians, he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the historiographical weather. Dismissing ‘revisionism’ as a form of antiquarian empiricism, as Stone did, or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as Hill tried to do, simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.
Housman’s Bookshop interview extract earlier this month.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing.”
“His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterances obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.”
Frederick Douglas
“one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.”
Karl Marx
“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours:
In the January 2020 issue of The Critic, the politician, historian and writer Alan Sked wrote an article entitled Dishonest Abe. To eternal shame and damnation, Sked was given a space in the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) recent letters page to again attack Abraham Lincoln. Sked is a right-winger. He was a founding member of UKIP in 1993. He was formerly a member of the Anti-Federalist League and the “Brugge Group”, which regarded the decision of Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as a betrayal of her legacy. Sked is still a Conservative member.
Sked’s first paragraph in the Critic article sets the tone for the diatribe. He writes:
“Today, Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most popular president, and historians devote enormous efforts to ensuring that his reputation survives unscathed. Yet during his presidency, he was hated by millions, and in 1865, he was assassinated. Even before the Civil War, he was loathed by perhaps a majority of his fellow countrymen, and in the presidential election of 1860, 61 per cent of the electorate voted against him.”[1]
From its tone, it would appear that Sked would like to assassinate Lincoln again. Regardless of how many people voted for or liked him, Lincoln was hell-bent on saving the Union. Whether He wanted war or not Lincoln was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. As Niles Niemuth writes, “During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[2]
Sked further writes, “Rather than accept him as president, the South seceded from the Union. The Founding Fathers had indicated that secession was entirely legal. Lincoln should have taken the advice of the Supreme Court, but rather than that, he manipulated an attack on Fort Sumter to give him an excuse for war. Lincoln vetoed an attempted constitutional compromise and got his way by illegally organising a military invasion of Virginia. There, his troops were humiliated.”
This paragraph shows not only Sked’s revisionist credentials but is a fabrication of historical events. When the Union commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky, refused to turn the fort over to the Confederacy, the South laid siege to the small federal detachment, refusing to allow supplies. According to Tom Mackaman:
“That Fort Sumter should have been the trigger event for all of this was itself the outcome of an unpredicted chain of events. Located next to Charleston, the citadel of fire-eating, pro-slavery secessionism, Sumter was part of a constellation of lightly guarded federal bases and arsenals scattered across the South and the border states that had become the focal point of preparations for war. In the period before the war, secessionists concentrated on taking, by hook or crook, federal positions. This was the great hope of the South. Its cash crop agriculture was bound to the “workshop of the world,” British industrial capitalism. It did little manufacturing and could produce little of its war material.[3]
Towards the end of his article, and I could be wrong Sked makes the point that I believe no other historian has ever said. Aside from saying that Lincoln had no liking for blacks, he writes :
“The Civil War was fought between two deeply racist societies who differed only over the fate of slavery. After 12 years of Reconstruction following his death, the North and South agreed on a racist political system for the South, which by the end of the century became the Solid South governed by Jim Crow laws. Blacks only began to experience equality after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lincoln’s role in their long journey to emancipation must be treated with great caution.[4]
It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the fabrication of history. Leon Trotsky once pointed out that lies about history are meant to conceal real social contradictions.
Sked’s lies are indirectly refuted by Niemuth, who points out, “ While not an open abolitionist, Lincoln’s political record before the Civil War was outstanding, and he had come to be seen years before 1860 as the leading spokesman of the antislavery forces in the United States. The southern slavocracy certainly understood what it meant when he won the presidency, responding to his rise to the White House with secession. To the extent that any individual in history can be credited with playing a decisive role in destroying slavery, it is undoubtedly Lincoln.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great Frederick Douglas, who said of Lincoln:
“Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war. But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.[5]
Note
In the past I would have sent a copy of this article to the TLS as a form of reply to Sked’s letter in the recent TLS. But as the TLS has never printed a letter or had an article from an orthodox Marxist I do not see the point.
Mark Olden’s book Murder in Notting Hill is a well-researched and crafted investigation into the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the killer was never caught despite being well-known in the area. Olden outs the killer in the book, saying, “After I began investigating the case in 2005, I learned that the killer’s identity was “the worst kept secret in Notting Hill”. Three people identified Digby to me as the man who struck the fatal blow. Two of them had been questioned by the police about the murder; the third was Digby’s stepdaughter, Susie Read. Breagan, who insisted he was innocent, told me that when the police detained him, he was placed in a cell next to Digby, where he was able to iron out a discrepancy in their stories – after which the police released them both.”
Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54 on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in 2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race Riots: the Socialist Answer,[1]“So long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy. This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’ real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[2]
[1] Race Riots: the Socialist Answer, Labour Review, Vol. 3 No. 5, December 1958, pages 134-137.
[2] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record upon which history will judge us tomorrow.”
Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
“War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.”—Ben Ferencz
The leader by will of the people differs from the leader by will of God in that the former is compelled to clear the road for himself or, at any rate, to assist the conjuncture of events in discovering him. Nevertheless, the leader is always a relation between people, the individual supply to meet the collective demand. The controversy over Hitler’s personality becomes the sharper the more the secret of his success is sought in himself. In the meantime, another political figure would be difficult to find that is, in the same measure, the focus of anonymous historical forces. Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
Leon Trotsky- What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)
This is an interesting and well-researched book on the writers who covered the Nuremburg Trials of leading Nazis after the Second World War. The magnitude of the trials drew in journalists and writers from all over the world. Writers John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, William Shirer, and future German politicians such as Willy Brandt all observed the trials. The title of the writers’ castle was because the journalists were housed in the Schloss Faber-Castell castle in Stein, a nearby town.
Neumahr is a German author and literary agent, and his book is less about the crimes of the Nazis but more about the writer’s reaction to the crimes of the Nazis. As Neumahr points out in the book, not all journalists or writers cover themselves with glory. Even a cursory glance at their reports of the trials shows that some resorted to outright lying and presented less-than-objective accounts of the proceedings. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, offered a first-hand account of the courtroom he never went to.
Others brought their ideological baggage with them, which showed in their articles. Erika Mann was the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. Because of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, (she was considered a Jew by the Nazis) she held an abiding hatred of the Nazis, which coloured her writings on the trial. The French Stalinist writer Elsa Triolet wrote many misleading and downright false reports to support her belief that the Anglo-American judges and lawyers were pro-Nazi.
Neumahr’s approach is “biographical and kaleidoscopic”. Given the highly political nature of the trial, it is a little strange that NeuMahr rarely delves into the politics of prosecutions or the writers that covered it, which is a big weakness in the book. As Bill Niven points out, “In most cases, he is as much, if not more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen protagonists before, during and after their time at the Faber-Castell castle than he is with their actual journalistic response to the military tribunal. Neumahr is especially interested in all the social goings-on at the castle, whose guests – despite the separation of male and female quarters and, eventually, of Soviet reporters from all others – enjoyed a high level of fraternisation. Neumahr follows the various relationships of his protagonists. Erika Mann moved into the castle with her partner and fellow reporter Betty Knox (whom she referred to as her ‘beloved lunatic’) despite the press camp being run by the American military, for whom homosexuality was a punishable crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US judge at Nuremberg, had an affair. As Neumahr tells it, this was something of a relief for both parties: ‘Like Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually frustrated’, he writes, because ‘she hadn’t had sex with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on Gellhorn, we learn about her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, while the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet – who stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel and not the castle – focuses heavily on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.”[1]
The book’s strongest part is how Neumahr relates to how many writers and journalists were morally tarnished by political bias or other prejudices. This applies to author Eric Kästner[2]. One of my favourite childhood books was Emil and the Detectives. Despite having his books burnt by the Nazis in 1933, Kastner made a career for himself under the Nazis.
According to his Wikipedia page, “ The Gestapo interrogated Kästner several times, the national writers’ guild expelled him, and the Nazis burned his books as “contrary to the German spirit” during the book burnings of 10 May 1933, instigated by Joseph Goebbels. Kästner witnessed the event in person and later wrote about it. He was denied membership in the new Nazi-controlled national writers’ guild, Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller (RDS), because of what its officials called the “culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings before 1933. During the Third Reich, Kästner published apolitical novels such as Drei Männer im Schnee (Three Men in the Snow) (1934) in Switzerland. In 1942, he received a special exemption to write the screenplay for Münchhausen, using the pseudonym Berthold Bürger. The film was a prestige project by Ufa Studios to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment, an enterprise backed by Goebbels.
In 1944, Kästner’s home in Berlin was destroyed during a bombing raid. In early 1945, he and others pretended that they had to travel to the rural community of Mayrhofen in Tyrol for location shooting for a (non-existent) film, Das falsche Gesicht (The Wrong Face). The actual purpose of the journey was to avoid the final Soviet assault on Berlin. Kästner had also received a warning that the SS planned to kill him and other Nazi opponents before the arrival of the Soviets.[8] He was in Mayrhofen when the war ended. He wrote about this period in a diary published in 1961 under the title Notabene 45. Another edition, closer to Kästner’s original notes, was published in 2006 under the title Das Blaue Buch (The Blue Book).”[3]
Neumahr’s intention was never to write about the political nature or the duplicity of those prosecuting the Nazis. As Bill Hunter points “During this ten months, while the prosecutors of Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union, listed the sickening crimes of Nazism, world events showed the hypocrisy of the prosecuting Allies. Even while the aggressions of the Nazis were being recounted. British imperialism was maintaining a regime of terror and oppression in Greece, suppressing the colonial peoples struggling for freedom, and strafing Indonesian villages.The British prosecutor prated about justice. Meanwhile, Dr Kiesselbach, according to Tribune 6 September a declared opponent of de-Nazification was placed by British imperialism in charge of the German “Central Office of Justice”.
While the courtroom resounded with castigations of Nazi oppression and racial discrimination, American imperialist suppression was active in the Philippines, and lynch law was rampant in the Southern States.The prosecutors denounced the occupation methods of the Nazis. Yet, even while the French prosecutor mouthed phrases of indignation, the agents of French imperialism were torturing the natives of Indo-China and burning their villages.The miseries of slave labour under the Nazis were related to the court at the same time as 10 million Germans were uprooted and wandered homeless as a result of the wholesale expulsion policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the face of world events during the trial, who can deny that at Nuremberg, the pot called the kettle black, blackening itself still further even while doing so?[4]
“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
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.
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
I have just received John’s comment on my WordPress website [1]. “ How does publishing through Amazon (of all of places) square with the general view here? The simple answer to this question is that publishing on Amazon does not square at all with my politics. From the age of sixteen, I considered myself a Marxist, and I will eventually die a Marxist.
If it has escaped John’s notice for a long time, it has been impossible for a revolutionary Marxist to be published. The Writer George Orwell, who was not a Marxist, found it very difficult to find a publisher for his book Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was savvy enough to know that “Freedom of the Press” had been “ Something of a fake because, in the last resort, money controls opinion”.
This was true in Orwell’s time and is even more true today. Unless you have access to a revolutionary Marxist party with its own printing press, you will not get published. No small or big publishing house will publish an orthodox or classical Marxist. The use of Amazon as an avenue to get my work published and reach a large audience does not endorse Amazon as a capitalist enterprise.
It may have escaped John’s notice, but all publishing houses, big or small, are run on capitalist lines. To accept or decline an offer from one of these or to publish on platforms such as Amazon does not mean one denies one’s politics it is but a means to an end. If every author turned down the opportunity to be published because the publishing company was a capitalist nothing of worth would have been published. John’s argument is false, and I do not accept it.
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.
A Trumpet of Sedition 