New Interventions, Volume 13, no 1

Trade Unions and Immigration

Campaign for a Marxist Party: An Autopsy

Construction Industry Strikes

Germany Today

Spooks in Kosovo

People’s Cricket

Joseph Conrad and Imperialism

A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion

Volume 13, no 1, Spring 2009, £2.00

NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 4

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New Interventions Volume 13, no 1, Spring 2009

Steve Cohen, A Horrible History 3

How trade unions have dealt with immigrant workers

Mike Jones, HC Hansen — CIA 17

A Danish Social Democratic Spook

The Campaign for a Marxist Party: An Autopsy 18

Phil Sharpe, Steve Freeman and Bridget St John draw some lessons

Theodor Bergmann, Germany Today 26

How the economic crisis is affecting Germany

Arthur Trusscott, Rajani Palme Ratzinger 28

The Pope and his historical parallels

Mike Jones, Spies Versus Mafiosi in Kosovo 30

The strange case of the arrested German spooks

Chris Gray, Cricket, People’s Cricket 32

The class dynamics of cricket

Mike Jones, Spooks and Scandinavia 35

Covert British anti-communist activities

H Lavant, The Recent Construction Strikes 36

Presenting a challenge to the bosses’ anti-union agenda

Armand Robin, Letter to the Gestapo 38

The French anarchist sets a challenge

JJ Plant, Recent Exhibitions 39

A critical view of London’s exhibitions

Chris Gray, Joseph Conrad and Imperialism 43

The impact of the Far East and Africa on Conrad’s writings

Reviews — Party and class; Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? re-examined 45

Letters — From Stan Newens, JJ Plant, Steve Freeman et al, Moscow Praxis 48

New Interventions is indexed at the Alternative Press Centre, website www.altpress.org, e-mail [email protected]

Editorial Board: Mike Belbin, Paul Flewers, Chris Gray, Mike Jones, John Plant, Alan Spence, Dave Spencer

Subscriptions: £10 for four issues, £18.00 for eight issues, unwaged half price, institutions and

abroad £15 for four issues, £25 for eight issues. Cheques to be made payable to New Interventions.

The views expressed in articles, reviews and letters in New Interventions represent those of the author or authors, and may not coincide with those of members of the Editorial Board.

ISSN 1464-6757, 116 Hugh Road, Coventry CV3 1AF, United Kingdom

E-mail: [email protected] (editorial), [email protected] (business)


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Steve Cohen

A Horrible History Trade Unions and Immigration

The following article is a slightly edited version of a chapter of Steve Cohen’s book on immigration controls, Standing on the Shoulders of Fascism: From Immigration Control to the Strong State (Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, 2006). Steve Cohen practised as an immigration lawyer for over 25 years, and was active in campaigns against racism and deportations. He wrote many books and articles on the question of racism and immi-gration laws, including Deportation is Freedom: The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls and Immigration Controls, the Family and the Welfare State, both published by Jessica Kings-ley, London.

HREE issues are dominant in the relationship between immigration controls and trade unions. Firstly, unions

are extremely powerful. They have the power (and they have exercised this power) to influence and shape controls for good or for bad. Secondly, just as immigration controls are global, so also are all their manifestations. This histori-cally includes a generalised, if differentiated, labour move-ment support for restrictions — as is reflected, for instance, in the USA. Thirdly, trade unions in the UK are almost a paradigm example of the fact that the self-organisation of the oppressed — in this case those subject to controls — can exert significant political influence, not least on unions themselves. In more than one historical period — Jews flee-ing pogroms at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black people seeking entry from the 1960s, refu-gees and other undocumented people in flight since the late 1980s — this self-organisation has forced unions at least to

rethink their absolute support for controls and to shift them to a position of questioning or criticising restrictions.

In another critical period — that of Nazism — the re-verse situation proves the same point. The absence of this self-organised pressure allowed sectors of the labour movement to continue to support quite reactionary posi-tions. Other factors have certainly influenced the labour movement, or sectors of it, in recoiling at various periods, including now, from absolute support for controls — not least the division that controls can create on the shop floor and also the existence of a vast pool of the undocumented as potential union members.

1 However, what is being ar-

gued here is that a central and probably dominant factor — and one usually ignored

2 — is the self-organisation of those

most immediately targeted by controls.

I: Unions Against Jewish Refugees

Documented elsewhere3 is the support given by significant

1. See G Avci and C McDonald, ‘Chipping Away at the Fortress:

Unions, Immigration and the Transnational Labour Market’, International Migration, Volume 38, no 2, 2000.

2. Avci and McDonald (ibid) completely ignore the issue of self-

organisation — as well as the history of Jewish immigration and Jewish refugees.

3. See generally J Garrard, The English and Immigration, London,

1971; B Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905, London, 1972; S Cohen, It’s the Same Old Story: Immi-gration Controls Against Jewish, Black and Asian people with

Special Reference to Manchester, Manchester, 1987.

T

This Issue

This issue of New Interventions features as its lead article Steve Cohen’s detailed history of trade unions and immigration. This topic is especially pertinent today because of the continuing whipping up of hysteria by the reactionary press and right-wing political organisations on the issue of immigration and refugees, and the danger of reactionary sentiments being expressed in respect of non-UK workers, as we recently saw in the use of the slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in the Lindsey refinery dispute. New Labour has not been immune from this, as was demonstrated in the unpleasant jibe about identity cards for foreign workers in its Crewe by-election campaign material last year, and Gordon Brown’s own call for ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. It is with sadness that we announce that Steve, who had been suffering from ill-health for some time, died shortly before we published his article, and we send our condolences to his family, friends and comrades.


4

sections of the labour movement to this country’s first sig-nificant immigration control legislation — the 1905 Aliens Act directed at Jewish refugees. For instance, resolutions for control were passed by the TUC at its conferences in 1892, 1894 and 1895.

4 In 1895, the TUC organised a special confer-

ence where it was agreed that the question of control be put in a list of questions to be asked of all Parliamentary candidates.

5

On a local level, Manchester Trades Council was not untypical. Its annual report for 1892 provides this justifica-tion behind a half-concealed anti-Semitism:

The question of the immigration of destitute for-eigners into this country has engaged the attention of the Council, and a resolution to the effect that the time may be considered for the great mass of trade unionists throughout the country to endeavour by united effort to influence the Government to legis-late in this matter was passed. The question was considered by the Council to be of great importance, the labour of our countrymen being undersold by foreigners coming to this country ready to accept any wages that may be offered to them and willing to work any number of hours… England has long been a place of refuge for the political exiles of other countries and no objection can be taken to them lo-cating themselves amongst us, but when the foreign workman is induced to come over here by some of his wealthy countrymen or co-religionists so that he may be worked and sweated to the detriment of his own people… it is quite time that the workers of this country (whether trade unionists or not) rose in arms and protested with firmness and determina-tion against the continuation of this curse.

6

All this was the tip of the iceberg. The fanatical anti-Semite WH Wilkins, in his book The Aliens Invasion published in 1892, named another 43 labour organisations advocating restrictions. These ranged from the Durham miners to the Liverpool Trades Council. Other trades councils came out in favour. These included London, where control was sup-ported by the renowned rank-and-file dockers’ leaders Ben Tillett and Tom Mann.

7 JH Wilson MP, who was secretary

of the Seamen’s Union, was one of the first to propose legis-lation in Parliament.

8 The emergent socialist organisations

had an extremely ambivalent attitude. Bruce Glasier, prom-inent in the Independent Labour Party, wrote that ‘neither the principle of the brotherhood of man nor the principle of social equality implies that brother nations or brother men may crowd upon us in such numbers as to abuse our hospi-tality, overturn our institutions or violate our customs’.

9

There has been less documentation of the similar role of the trade union movement in supporting controls against Jews at another crucial period — that immediately preced-ing the Second World War.

Louise London, in her book Whitehall and the Jews,10

4. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, p 96. 5. Manchester Evening News, 11 July 1895. 6. Quoted in Cohen, It’s The Same Old Story, p 14.

7. London Evening News, 27 May 1891 and 19 June 1891. 8. Hansard, 11 February 1893. 9. Labour Leader, 3 April 1904.

10. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948, Cambridge,

has shown how the majority of Jewish refugees wanting to flee Nazism in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the war were excluded from the UK. George Orwell in the March 1942 edition of the American magazine Partisan Review wrote: ‘In the years before the war it was largely trade union opposition that prevented a big influx of Ger-man Jewish refugees.’

11 No major study has examined this

trade union opposition. Tony Kushner in his book The Hol-ocaust and the Liberal Imagination is the main source of documentation. He confirms Orwell’s assessment, stating:

Individual and national trades unions not only on the whole supported restrictionist measures, they also encouraged and were often instrumental in their implementation.

12

Kushner describes how in the summer of 1939 Walter Cit-rine, the General Secretary of the TUC, wrote to all affiliat-ed unions asking for their views on the exclusion of refu-gees and the prohibition on employment of those who did achieve entry. Not untypical was that of Ernest Bevin, lead-er of the Transport and General Workers Union — the larg-est union in Europe — who said that the TUC General Council was ‘unfortunately placed in the position of making a choice between the refugee and our own countrymen, and on that basis they must of course choose the latter’. The Association of Cine Technicians would only accept the entry of refugees on condition of the ‘deportation of other foreign technicians whom we consider are not essential to the British film industry’. The National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives through its Secretary, George Chester, wrote that easing restrictions should be opposed, as ‘the majority who would benefit by the regulations would not be refugees, but Jews who cannot be placed under such a category’.13 Based on these and similar responses, the TUC issued a restrictionist statement reported in the Manchester Guardian:

Congress has always expressed its utmost sympathy with the position of political refugees. Its attitude to the admission of intellectuals, scientists and profes-sional men has always been considerate. But with regard to immigrants of the mechanic, skilled arti-san, or agricultural type, it is obvious that the posi-tion in which we find ourselves, we must be con-cerned with our own people first.

14

This attack on Jewish workers by the labour movement was extended to refugee industrialists behind a veil of only thin-ly disguised anti-Semitism. The 1938 TUC conference actu-ally passed a resolution against refugee firms. The General and Municipal Workers Union and the Boot and Shoe Op-eratives, in responding to Citrine’s circular, accused refugee industrialists of ‘flouting every custom and tradition which obtains in this country’ and of ‘coming into the drawing

2000. 11. George Orwell, ‘London Letter’, Partisan Review, March-April

1942. 12. Tony Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’,

in The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Oxford, 1994,

pp 61-89. 13. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, pp 79-

80.

14. Manchester Guardian, 26 August 1939.


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room of our business with dirty feet and dirty money’. The very language of this equation of capitalism with Jewry — a Jewry about to be liquidated by Nazism — echoed, for in-stance, the language used by Ben Tillett, the rank-and-file dockers’ leader, socialist member of the ILP and agitator for the 1905 Aliens Act — who in 1894 had described the Jews as ‘the most consistent and determined money grubber we know’.

15

One of the most explicitly anti-Semitic trade union re-sponses to the admission of Jewish refugees was found in the Medical Practitioners Union — the union of doctors. In its opposition to Jewish refugees, and in particular to Jewish refugee doctors, it stated in the journal Medical World for 2 December 1938:

All men know there is one race which is never ab-sorbed, a race in which claims of ‘business’ always come before any consideration for those who are unwise enough to give them hospitality.16

The MPU was in effect the trade union wing of the doctors’ professional grouping, the British Medical Association. The BMA was similarly restrictionist. After the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria) in 1938, the BMA actually turned down a Home Office proposal to rescue 500 Austri-an refugee — that is, Jewish — doctors. The BMA carried on its support for immigration controls with the arrival of postwar black immigrants. From 1956 and for nearly two decades, the BMA passed resolutions calling for some form of controls.

17 Kushner reports that during the war itself the

MPU ‘used its offices to coordinate the activities of the ex-treme anti-Semitic organisations in Britain… close relations with the pro-Nazi MP Captain Ramsay brought about the surveillance of… the MPU by the British security services’.18

These interconnected organisational and political rela-tionships should act as a warning to those who still believe that controls can be ripped from their origins, sanitised and somehow rendered ‘benign’.

There were two areas where British government policy did allow for a limited number of refugee admissions. Both of these show, in the latter case by default, the potential or actual influence of trade union pressure. Firstly, the TUC was central in the movement to obtain safety for endan-gered socialists and trade unionists. AJ Sherman, in his book Island Refuge, records that Hugh Gaitskell, the future leader of the Labour Party, was sent to Europe to help peo-ple escape. After the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland, the TUC sent joint representatives to Czechoslovakia to see if they could secure the entry into the UK of members of the Sudeten German Democratic Party who had escaped but whom the Czechs were threatening to hand back to the Nazis. As a result, the UK government issued visas for 250 individuals — of the estimated 40 000 who had fled.

19 In

addition, the TUC helped secure the entry of other individ-uals from Germany and Austria, such as Max Beer, who

15. Labour Leader, 19 December 1894.

16. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 84. 17. S Cohen and D Hayes, They Make You Sick: Essays on Immigra-

tion Controls and Health, Manchester, p 39.

18. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, pp 83-84.

19. AJ Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third

Reich 1933-1939, London, 1973, pp 147-48.

came here in 1933 and was one of the first historians of the socialist movement in Britain. The moral of this story is that the TUC’s support for the rescue and entry of refugees was limited and labour-movement specific. But it did have a degree of influence, and this could and should have been expanded to all those wanting to flee the Nazi monster.

The second example which shows, by default, the po-tential power of the unions, relates to domestic servants. In the period before the war, up to 1800 permits for such em-ployment were being issued monthly. These were undoubt-edly the most open way of gaining entry, relatively speaking — everything being relative in a situation when hundreds of thousands were being effectively excluded. Kushner ar-gues that this policy was a result of ‘demands from middle-class women’s groups to liberalise admission policy towards domestics and thus help solve “the servant problem”’. In any event, an unsuccessful attempt was made to oppose even this liberalisation by the newly-formed National Un-ion of Domestic Workers — a union of less than a thousand members in a sector of over a million. This leads Kushner to conclude:

… it was in the occupations in which trade union in-fluence was weakest or non-existent — domestic service and nursing — that entry to Britain was most generous. It is a detail that reflects the im-portance of organised labour in determining refugee policy during the 1930s.20

II: Trade Union Support for Controls After 1945

The oft-quoted assertion that black people and postwar migrants suddenly started to arrive in this country in June 1948 on board the Empire Windrush from the Caribbean needs to be challenged in three important respects. Firstly, as Peter Fryer has shown, there has been a continuous presence of black people in the UK for 500 years.

21 In the

nineteenth century, one of the leading members of the Chartists was William Coffey from St Kitts in the Caribbe-an, who was also a founder of the first union for garment workers, the Metropolitan Tailors Association. In the early twentieth century, this presence was represented by, for example, African, Arab and Lascar seafarers. However, in 1930 the TUC passed a resolution, proposed by the National Union of Seamen, opposing the ‘continued employment of Aliens and undesirable coloured labour’.

22

Secondly, in the years immediately following the Se-cond World War, the presence of black people from the Caribbean did not represent the majority of migrant labour. In fact, it was only a small minority.

23 Black commonwealth

citizens in the late 1940s and early 1950s were vastly out-numbered by the greater number of East Europeans brought here after the war under the European Voluntary Workers Scheme. This was ‘managed migration’ with a

20. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 71. 21. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Brit-

ain, London, 1984. 22. K Lunn, ‘Race Relations or Industrial Relations? Race and La-

bour in Britain 1880-1950’, in K Lunn (ed), Race and Labour in

Twentieth Century Britain, London, 1985, p 16. 23. According to Fryer, by 1958 there were only 125 000 Caribbeans

and 55 000 Indians and Pakistanis who had come to the UK

since the war (Fryer, Staying Power, pp 372-73).


6

vengeance, with an estimated 100 000 workers involved.24

In addition, up to another 100 000 ex-servicemen of the Polish Free Army were based in the UK and were reconsti-tuted, under the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act, as the Polish Resettlement Corps.

25 Alongside of this, and sometimes

overlapping it, was the clandestine governmental scheme bringing to the UK thousands of Nazis, ex-Nazis and Nazi sympathisers. This was generally unknown at the time.

There was a mixed trade union response to the Europe-an Voluntary Workers Scheme. But the dominant view, at least in the initial period, seems to be that of the crude economic nationalism expressed by a motion at the Na-tional Union of Miners Scottish conference in 1947. This stated sharply: ‘That conference fully rejects the proposals of the Government to employ Polish nationals and dis-placed persons in the coal-mining industry.’

26 A crucial

influence within the Scottish NUM was the Communist Party. Likewise, the party had a real base within the union south of the border and revealed the same national chau-vinism there. Arthur Horner, a member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee and President of the South Wales NUM, said at the party’s 1945 conference: ‘We will not allow the importation of foreign — Polish, Italian or even Irish — labour to stifle the demands of the British people to have decent conditions in British mines.’

27 In

1947, and by now the NUM’s General Secretary, Horner attacked migrant miners, saying that the government ‘might get Poles or displaced persons but not coal’.

28

The party opposed the Polish Resettlement Act, with the main speakers in Parliament against the legislation be-ing its own members Phil Piratin and Willie Gallacher.

29

Gallacher demanded that ‘the Poles go home’.30

In 1947, Harry Pollitt, the party’s General Secretary, wrote in his book Looking Ahead:

I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500 000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we em-ploy Poles who ought to be back in their own country, and bring to work in Britain displaced persons who ought also to be sent back to their own countries?

31

The unions only sanctioned the resettlement scheme on the basis that the overseas workers were ‘first out’ in the case of

24. Ibid, p 19.

25. Ibid. 26. Ibid, p 22. Parallel to this were allegations about the Poles’

anti-Semitism and anti-Soviet views (Lunn, ‘Race Relations or

Industrial Relations?’, p 20). 27. A Horner, The Communist Party and the Coal Crisis, CPGB

pamphlet, 1945, quoted in Paul Flewers, ‘Hitting the Pits: The

Communist Party of Great Britain and the National Union of Miners’, New Interventions, Volume 7, no 1, Winter 1996.

28. The Times, 24 February 1947. It is ironic that whilst threatening

industrial action against foreign workers, Horner and his col-leagues in the NUM leadership strenuously opposed any strike action by NUM members in defence of their pay and conditions.

29. P Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics, London, 1965, p 118.

30. Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and founder of

the by now defunct left-wing Socialist League, also expressed reservations about admission of workers from overseas (Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics, p 116).

31. Harry Pollitt, Looking Ahead, London, 1947, p 72.

any redundancies in the industries which they entered.32

The Communist Party actually managed to debar Poles from membership of the Civil Service Clerical Association.

33

With the eventual demise of the European Voluntary Workers Scheme, the TUC began to question the arrival of workers from the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, which was founded in 1948 as part of the postwar reconstruction of capital. The General Council Report to the TUC Congress in 1954 demanded that ‘full regard must be taken of the interests of British workers before permits are granted’.

34

III: Support for Controls Against Black

Commonwealth Citizens35

And thirdly the ‘spontaneity’ of black immigration needs also to be questioned. Black workers themselves did not simply arrive in this country after 1945 on impulse. Many were effectively recruited via advertising campaigns. One significant lesson can be drawn from this postwar history of black recruitment and migration. On the occasions when it did come out against discrimination, the trade union movement, and in particular the TUC, made the fatuous distinction between opposing racism and supporting immi-gration control (controls being eventually introduced against black commonwealth citizens through the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act).

Some sections of the movement did greet black immi-grants with overt racism. For instance, one writer has rec-orded:

In February 1955, workers at the West Bromwich Corporation began a series of token Saturday strikes to protest the employment of an Indian trainee con-ductor; seven months later Wolverhampton transport workers banned all overtime to protest against the increased use of black workers and they demanded a five per cent ‘colour quota’ (there were 68 black workers out of a total of 900).

36

The strike in Wolverhampton was supported by the local branch of the TGWU. A branch secretary is quoted as deny-ing there was any racism, but ‘we don’t intend the platform staff to be made up to its full strength by coloured people only’.

37 These instances were not isolated. The Bristol Om-

nibus Company refused to take on black workers until a boycott of its buses by black passengers made it back down.

38 The general context is described by another au-

thority writing in respect to Indian workers in the foundry industry:

Other examples could be given but they would only

32. J Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers in Britain, Manches-ter, 1968, pp 57-59.

33. See Flewers, ‘Hitting the Pits’.

34. TUC, Report of Eighty-Seventh Congress, 1954, p 288. 35. A particularly interesting monograph looking at the position of

the TUC is R Miles and A Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers

and New Commonwealth Immigration, 1954-1973, Working Pa-pers on Ethnic Relations, no 6, Research Unit on Ethnic Rela-tions, University of Bristol, 1977.

36. R Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, Oxford, 2000, p 131 n14.

37. Fryer, Staying Power, p 376.

38. Ibid.


7

serve to repeat the same general principles; where trade unions were well organised in private industry they were usually successful in controlling the entry of black workers, restricting them to labouring or other menial jobs and confining their employment to time of labour demand.

39

Some senior members of the TUC adopted essentially racist positions. Sir William Carron was a member of the TUC General Council between 1954 and 1965, and President of the Amalgamated Engineering Union between 1956 and 1967. At his own union’s conference in 1967 he openly blamed immigration and therefore black workers for the economic crisis of the late 1960s.

40 He attributed all prob-

lems within welfare to ‘the ever growing number of indi-viduals who were not born in this country and who have in no way contributed towards the setting up of a fund into which they so willingly dip their fingers’.

41

Six weeks after making this speech, Carron was ap-pointed a Lord. The strength of this racism within the la-bour movement was reflected in the popular culture of the period. In the satirical but ultimately reactionary 1959 mov-ie I’m All Right Jack, Peter Sellers plays the role of the dem-agogic shop steward, Fred Kite, in an engineering works who in calling a strike tells the workers: ‘The next thing you know you’ll have blacks working here and taking our jobs like on the buses in Birmingham.’

But this racism was not replicated everywhere. Various local union bodies (such as Croydon Trades Council in 1958

42) passed resolutions against discrimination. At the

ASLEF train drivers conference in 1957 a resolution was proposed which was racist on the shop floor (refusing pro-motion to non-British workers) with an additional sub-agenda of immigration control (advocating that British Railways cease to recruit for footplate grades from ‘British colonial and foreign labour’). The resolution was opposed by the General Secretary, Albert Hallworth, and was lost 49 votes to six.

43 As early as 1955, the TUC passed a resolution

(on ‘coloured workers’) condemning racism.44

In contradic-tion to this, the TUC initially viewed race relations legisla-tion as an interference in free collective bargaining.

45 How-

ever, once legislation — the Race Relations Act — was passed in 1965 and made stronger in 1968, it championed it.

46 The Race Relations Act was itself one half of the non-

sensical distinction made between racism and immigration control. In the same year, 1965, in which it passed its first race relations enactment, the Labour government also

39. M Duffield, ‘Rationalisation and the Politics of Segregation: Indian Workers in Britain’s Foundry Industry 1945-62’, in K Lunn (ed), Race and Labour in Twentieth Century Britain, p 160.

40. J Rex, ‘The Race Relations Catastrophe’, in T Burgess et al, Matters of Principle: Labour’s Last Chance, Harmondsworth, 1968, p 80.

41. Ibid. 42. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 131

n15.

43. J Garrard, The English And Immigration 1880-1910, Oxford, 1971, p 9.

44. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 131.

45. For details of the TUC’s objections to legislation, see Miles and Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers and New Commonwealth Immigration, pp 22-23.

46. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 130.

strengthened immigration control through introducing new rules which restricted the right of entry of dependents and increased government powers of deportation of those who did arrive. One was a trade-off for the other. A leading authority has stated that ‘the systematic and effective con-trol of Asian and black immigration began in 1965 rather than 1962’.

47 Also in vastly reducing the number of em-

ployment vouchers to be issued, Labour ‘took discrimina-tion out of the market place and gave it the sanction of the state’.

48 Again in the same year, 1968, in which it strength-

ened its race relations enactment, the Labour government also strengthened immigration control by excluding East African Asians from entry with a new Commonwealth Im-migrants Act — another trade-off. This dualism and con-tradiction was explicitly articulated in parliament by the Home Secretary Frank Soskice as follows:

The government accepts that there must be, simply because of the scale of immigration, effective con-trol of numbers… [but] our aim should be to see there is only one class of citizens, each with equal rights… respect… opportunity… career of happiness and fulfilment in the life of the community.

49

The idea that immigration controls can deliver equal rights, respect, opportunity, happiness, fulfilment is a sick joke. It is as much as a joke as the idea there can be non-racist or fair controls. However, significant sections of the trade union movement supported post-1945 immigration controls against black people whilst voicing opposition to ‘discrimi-nation’ elsewhere. It is relatively well known is that in 1955 the biennial delegates’ conference of the TGWU passed a resolution opposing ‘any form of colour bar’ — in effect condemning the activities of its members on the West Mid-lands buses. What is far less well known or cited is that the same resolution attacked the ‘grave situation which is re-vealed by uncontrolled immigration’.

50 The 1957 conference

of the same union again voted for control. This was report-ed on 11 July in the Manchester Guardian under the heading of ‘Unions Fear of Influx of Coloured People’. The Guardian pointed out that the resolution was aimed particularly at ‘West Indians’. Frank Cousins, General Secretary of the union and future Labour minister, was quoted as saying the union ‘could not allow these people unrestricted entry into Britain’.

The TUC’s support of controls was in a sense predicta-ble. It was based on its understanding of ‘race relations’. Behind all its resolutions opposing discrimination there was one major assumption. This was that the ‘problem’ was not

47. Ian Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi Racial Britain, London, 1997, p 136.

48. A Sivanandan, ‘Race, Class and the State’, in A Different Hun-ger, Writings on Black Resistance, Pluto, 1982 p 109 (reprinted from Race and Class, Spring 1976).

49. Hansard, 23 March 1965, quoted in Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 141. Not surprisingly, the ex-tension to the race relations legislation contained in the Race

Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 is hedged with restrictions as regards the implementation of immigration control. See Immi-gration, Nationality and Refugee Law Handbook produced by

Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, 2002 edition, p 270.

50. Duffield, ‘Rationalisation and the Politics of Segregation’, p 171

n 91.


8

white racism. Rather it was immigration itself, and there-fore immigrants themselves. And the answer to the prob-lem was that immigrants should adapt or integrate to Brit-ish norms.

51 This was to receive governmental recognition

under New Labour in 2000 with the formation of the Na-tional Refugee Integration Forum. The TUC General Coun-cil’s Report to the 1966 Congress specifically said that busi-ness should only ‘recruit workers who would adapt them-selves’.

52 So for the TUC there was in fact no contradiction

between supporting both race relations and immigration control legislation — they were both seen as resolving the same ‘problem’.

The TUC adopted a position in favour of controls seven years ahead of the 1962 Act. In April 1955, a TUC delegation including its own General Secretary, Victor Tewson, and Arthur Deakin, the right-wing General Secretary of the TGWU, met with the Minister of Labour, Sir Walter Monckton, and urged immigration restrictions.

53 The Gen-

eral Council Report to the 1955 Congress said that the dele-gation had told Monckton: ‘The government must have a policy which could ensure that the rate of immigration could be controlled.’

54 It also quoted a memorandum from

the Ministry of Labour Staff Association in favour of con-trols. Amongst other matters, this memorandum contained bizarre racist stereotypes. It stated that immigrants were unsatisfactory workers as they lacked ‘manual strength or ability to withstand inclement weather’.

55 The 1956 General

Council report said: ‘This year the National Union of Rail-waymen have pressed for some form of immigration con-trol… the point was discussed with the present Minister of Labour.’

56 It is surprising that the NUR, a general union,

took a position further to the right on this issue than its companion craft union, ASLEF, described above.

The 1958 Congress was a critical one if the TUC were to give a lead against immigration controls. This is because Congress met just after the racist riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham. The General Council report certainly did pro-vide a lead — a lead backwards. It stated: ‘This year appre-hensions have been expressed about the numbers of immi-grants from Pakistan.’

57 It not only called for immigration

controls,58

but also raised the racist spectre of the diseased alien by declaring ‘a medical examination should be includ-ed within these immigration controls’. Furthermore, the General Council Report stated that in April 1958 the TUC had written (in the name of George Woodcock, later Gen-eral Secretary) to the new Minister of Labour (Iain Mac-leod) saying that West Indian workers were welcome, but suggesting restrictions might be imposed on Indian and

51. See Miles and Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers and New Commonwealth Immigration, for a detailed discussion.

52. TUC, Report of Ninety-Eighth Congress, 1966, p 260. 53. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 7

n 18.

54. TUC, Report of the Eighty-Seventh Congress, 1955, pp 145-46. 55. The Memorandum is discussed in more detail in Miles and

Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers and New Commonwealth

Immigration, p 5. 56. TUC, Report of Eighty-Eighth Congress, 1956, paragraph 68 of

the General Council’s report.

57. TUC, Report of the Ninetieth Congress, 1958, p 125. 58. Hansen records that following Notting Hill the Common-

wealth Sub-Committee of the TUC criticised controls (Hansen,

Citizenship and Immigration In Postwar Britain, p 7 n 20).

Pakistani workers, not least on account of their alleged poor health.

59 In fact this was further to the right politically

than the Tory government. Macloed replied (with a mid-twentieth-century version of imperial preference) that the government was ‘unwilling to contemplate a departure from the traditional readiness of this country to receive citizens of British status’.

60 Vincent Tewson gave a speech

condemning the riots. He linked this to immigration con-trol, and said: ‘I would however express the personal opin-ion that there should be gates in their land of origin and here through which people must pass.’

61

Thus Tewson was calling not just for immigration con-trols on entry but exit controls to be administered through the countries of departure — which would be one way of overcoming the Tories’ then objection to restrictions.

By 1962, the government, under pressure of popular agi-tation for controls as represented by Notting Hill, had re-versed its position. The 1962 Congress report says that the General Council opposed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of that year. In other words, it opposed this first post-war legislation against black people. However, this was not an objection in principle, but only to ‘the manner in which the Government has chosen to institute controls’. Instead it once again in effect called for exit controls, and ‘invited the governments of those Commonwealth countries themselves to limit the flow of immigrants’.

One reason the TUC criticised the 1962 Act was because the Labour Party, then in opposition, voted against it. Hugh Gaitskill, the party’s otherwise right-wing leader, took a highly principled position on the issue of immigration con-trol. In a memorable parliamentary speech against the leg-islation, he said:

It has been said that the test of a civilised country is how it treats its Jews. I would extend that and say that the test of a civilised country is how it behaves to all its citizens of a different race, religion and col-our.

62

However, when Labour came to power in 1964 under Har-old Wilson it not only enforced the legislation but strengthened it. So the General Council in its 1965 report once again explicitly called for immigration controls on the racist grounds that there had ‘been the growth of the pro-portion of Commonwealth immigrants lacking an adequate knowledge of English and of British customs’. From this point in time the TUC, the Labour Party and the Tories were in open agreement on the need for some form of im-migration control, though they might disagree on detail. For instance, the General Council Report to the 1970 Con-gress considered Labour’s 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. This was a racist measure which excluded East African Asians with UK passports. However, the General Council

59. Ibid, p 7 n 19 and p 130 n 12.

60. TUC Report of the Ninetieth Congress, 1958, p 125. 61. Ibid, p 460. 62. The Times, 17 November 1961. It has been cogently argued that

it was not so much that Wilson reversed Gaitskell’s position on controls, but rather that Gaitskell’s position was out of line with the whole development of Labour’s postwar position on

immigration control. See S Joshi and B Carter, ‘The Role of La-bour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’, Race and Class, Vol-ume 25, no 3, 1984. Also see S Cohen, A Hard Act To Follow:

The Immigration Act 1988, Manchester, undated, p 29.


9

did not condemn the racism. Rather it argued that immi-gration control had a function and this function was to serve the manpower needs of British industry — and that the UK should only ‘admit workers to take up jobs for which they were both needed and fitted’.

63 This again was

Old Labour’s ‘managed migration’ 30 years before New La-bour came up with the terminology, though not the precise scheme.

The General Council’s report to the 1971 TUC Congress had to deal with the Tories’ Immigration Bill then going through parliament. The General Council refused to make a ‘simple condemnation’ of the new legislation.

64 Instead it

said that future immigration control should be determined ‘with reference to trade unions’. In other words, the General Council wanted the TUC to have a say in deciding the lim-its on the numbers of black workers allowed entry. By 1978 and the return of a Labour government, the TUC was sup-porting employer sanctions — the transformation of bosses into Home Office spies through their being penalised for employing workers with inappropriate immigration sta-tus.

65

IV: The Self-Organisation of Jewish Workers — And its Effect on the Labour Movement

Significant sectors amongst Jewish trade unionists fought restrictions at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century. Black workers, often themselves trade union members, have led the way in opposing postwar con-trols since their inception in the 1962 Commonwealth Im-migrants Act. In the last decade or so, asylum seekers and others fleeing here have initiated their own resistance. In all three of these historical periods, it was — and remains — the struggle and self-organisation of the oppressed that forced the general labour movement to take more progres-sive positions.

Jewish workers quickly organised against the proposed Aliens Act. As early as 1894 a demonstration against con-trols was held in Whitechapel. The Jewish Chronicle report-ed that the following resolution was passed:

This mass meeting of Jewish trade unionists is of the opinion that the vast amount of poverty and misery which exists is in no way due to the influx of foreign workmen but is the result of the private ownership of the means of production; and this meeting calls upon the government to pass a universal compulso-ry eight-hours day with a minimum wage as an in-stalment of future reform.

66

In 1895, 11 Jewish trade unions produced the first ever pam-phlet against immigration controls. This was called A Voice From the Aliens, and it condemned the TUC’s support for controls.

67 It was written by Joseph Finn from Leeds and

63. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Second Congress, 1970,

p 393. 64. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Third Congress, 1971,

p 210.

65. Paragraph 88 of the First Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee On Race Relations And Immigration, Cmnd 7287, 1978.

66. Jewish Chronicle, 21 August 1894. 67. The leaflet is produced as an Appendix in S Cohen, Deporta-

tion Is Freedom: An Orwellian Analysis of Immigration Con-

trols, London, 2006.

Secretary of the Mantle Makers Union.68

The pamphlet was launched at meetings in London and Leeds — the London meeting being addressed by Eleanor Marx (the daughter of Karl Marx) and the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin.

69

One writer has claimed that Jewish trade unionists picketed the 1895 TUC conference on this issue.

70 In September 1902,

a huge rally against controls was held in Whitechapel. A local paper said of the rally:

It was called under the auspices of the Federated Tailors Union of London… the hall, capable of ac-commodating 3000 people, was filled to its utmost capacity and still thousands clamoured for admis-sion.

71

This campaign did not defeat the British state. Far more would have been required than this both from the Jewish community and from its potential allies. The Aliens Act was passed. However, this active struggle had a positive effect on English trade unionists, and as such shows the power of self-organisation.

72 The Whitechapel rally in 1902 attracted

some prominent English trade unionists to speak from the platform against controls, for instance Frank Brian of the Dockers Union, and Margaret Bondfield, Secretary of the National Union of Shop Assistants. The TUC passed no further resolutions for controls after 1895.

73 But it was not

simply neutralised. Elements within the TUC actually spoke out in opposition. James Sexton, the President of the TUC,

68. See the letter by Joseph Finn, Jewish Chronicle, 14 February 1902.

69. Jewish Chronicle, 13 December 1895.

70. C Benn, Keir Hardie, London, 1992, p 32. Benn provides no reference to this assertion.

71. The Eastern Post and City Chronicle, 20 September 1902.

72. See generally Cohen, It’s The Same Old Story, pp 15-19. The suggestion made there was that the English trade union re-sponse was simply ‘neutralised’. However, it is now clear that it

went somewhat beyond this into a more vocal opposition to control amongst some sectors. Also see S Cohen, That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, Leeds, 1984, p 25 (now also avail-

able at www.engageonline.org.uk/resources/funny/contents. html). It was argued here that the change in the position of the English labour movement was more the result of Jewish trade

union militancy on the shop floor than to Jewish workers spe-cifically campaigning against controls. However, on reflection, the evidence is probably more the other way around — though

with both factors having an importance when combined. This over-emphasis on Jewish shop-floor militancy was based on an attempt to escape the question of ‘ethnicity’ and follow writers

such as Castles and Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, 1973; Miles, Racism and Migrant Labour, 1982, and subsequently Lunn, ‘Race Relations or Indus-

trial Relations?’, in looking at migrant labour within the con-text of capitalist relations and the wider labour movement ra-ther than simply as a ‘racialised’ phenomenon. Though this is

undoubtedly preferable to a liberal ‘race relations’ approach, it is now my view that it can lead to both an underestimation of racism and an underestimation of self-organised activity

against racism. It can also lead to what amounts to an apologia for racism. Thus at one point Lunn describes postwar trade un-ion arguments that European voluntary labour could lead to

unemployment as ‘a rational response given shop-floor percep-tion of unemployment’ (ibid, p20).

73. Though a delegation was subsequently sent to the Home Sec-

retary demanding control (The Times, 6 February 1896).


10

personally denounced controls at its 1905 conference.74

On at least one occasion similar denunciations assumed a pub-lic form. Joseph Finn gave evidence to the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration which preceded the Aliens Act. In this he spoke of the Voice From the Aliens leaflet and the 1902 protest rally, and stated:

This leaflet and the mass meeting opened the eyes of the English trade unionists so much so that members of the Executive of the London Trades Council held a meeting on behalf of the English trade unionists to protest against the Cardiff (TUC) resolution.

75

Other trades councils which had supported controls ceased to campaign for them. London Trades Council in 1895 actu-ally voted against controls.

76 Giving evidence to the 1903

Royal Commission, Sam Freedom of the Leeds Jewish Tai-lors Union said of the support previously given by Leeds Trades Council (in 1894) that this was passed ‘just before our affiliation with that body, and I am certain that the same council would not endorse such a resolution at the present time’.

77

Finn also gave evidence to the Royal Commission that ‘several thousand copies’ of A Voice From the Aliens were distributed in Manchester. By 1903, Manchester Trades Council was desisting from agitating for the controls it had supported a decade earlier. The local paper reported that the Royal Commission had approached the Trades Council for its views. The Council had subsequently discussed con-trols but this was:

… in such a way as to create the impression in the minds of the delegates which suggested that they were, as representatives of organised labour, not se-riously concerned about the question. The result was that no action was taken and the matter has not been further discussed.

78

Indeed, Manchester Trades Council seems to have been involved in a local Protest Committee

79 against legislation,

and planned to have a joint march with the Jewish Tailors Union to Heaton Park where Keir Hardie,

80 the famous

socialist and founder of the ILP, was to speak.81

V: The Self-Organisation of the Undocumented

After 1945

Black workers in their turn echoed the experience of Jewish workers in resisting controls. The December 1961 edition of

74. TUC, Annual Report, 1905. 75. Quoted in Cohen, It’s The Same Old Story, p 18. 76. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, p 96

77. Cd 1742, Minutes, 14998: 15072: 20372. Quoted in Gainer, The Alien Invasion, p 96 and p 248 n 169.

78. Manchester Evening News, 26 January 1903.

79. See Cohen, It’s the Same Old Story, p 19. 80. Hardie voted against the Aliens Act and this represented a change

in position from one of support for some limited controls. Howev-

er, it seems he continued his support for controls against imported strike-breakers. See S Cohen, No One Is Illegal: Asylum and Immi-gration Control Past and Present, Stoke on Trent, 2003, p 260.

81. Jewish Chronicle, 10 June 1904; Manchester Evening News, 24 June 1904. The march does not seem to have taken place. This presumably was because in 1904 the Tories withdrew the then

Aliens Bill and redrafted it for introduction the following year.

the West Indian Gazette was devoted entirely to condemn-ing and organising against the proposed 1962 Common-wealth Immigrants Act. It reported that the Pakistani Workers Association, the Indian Workers Association and the West Indian Workers Association had come together to form the Coordinating Committee Against Racist Discrimina-tion. These organisations held a lobby of Parliament and a picket outside the Home Office protesting against controls.

The opposition to the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was even larger. The Coordinating Committee helped organise a demonstration through London. The Morning Star, the paper of the Communist Party, reported: ‘More than 3000 people marched through London’s West End to Downing Street to protest against the government’s new Immigration Bill.’

82

The 1971 Immigration Act provoked two major demon-strations, both of them predominantly black, within a cou-ple of weeks of each other. The first was reported in the Guardian:

About 5000 demonstrators against the Immigration Bill marched yesterday from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall. Most of the marchers were black and represented groups ranging from the Black Panthers through the West Indian Standing Conference to community associations from Smethwick and Brad-ford. Police precautions assumed the proportions of the most vigorous period of protest against the Vi-etnam war.

83

Two weeks later, The Times was reporting another march where: ‘Indian, Pakistan and West Indian immigrant organ-isations from all over Britain marched through London yesterday… protesting against the Immigration Bill’.

84

Black workers developed their struggle beyond that of their Jewish predecessors. They not only opposed the en-actment of immigration control legislation, they also resist-ed its enforcement after it became law. In the late 1970s, the focus of struggle switched to campaigns for the reunion of black families and against deportations.

85

Individual campaigns — of which a more detailed cri-tique is made in chapter three of my book Standing on the Shoulders of Fascism: From Immigration Control to the Strong State — are only pockets of resistance. But they are important examples. For instance, they represented one of the few consistent forms of struggle by anyone against any-thing after the Tories came to power in 1979. One of the continuing challenges to Tory racism took place in the heart of black communities, which gave birth to the politi-cal culture of anti-deportation campaigns. And campaigns continue today. They won’t and don’t go away. Year after year there are different campaigns throughout the country. They are a militant form of direct action. They are the fly-ing pickets of the movement against controls.

Campaigns against deportation have now spread to the new undocumented — asylum seekers and the impover-ished of the world. If the resistance of Jewish workers a century ago represented the first wave and the resistance of

82. Morning Star, 27 February 1968.

83. Guardian, 22 March 1971. 84. Times, 5 April 1971. 85. On early history of campaigns, see Cohen, No One Is Illegal, in

particular Chapter 11, ‘Resistance From Below’.


11

black workers from the 1960s to the 1990s the second, then the struggle of the refugees and other undocumented (in-cluding black workers) represents the third wave. This last struggle can be accurately dated from the late 1980s,

86 with

the mayhem created by the break-up of the Stalinist empire and the creation of the so-called new world order (more accurately disorder). And this struggle, as well as reproduc-ing the old, has developed novel forms. The vast rise in the numbers in detention — resulting in a modern building scheme of removal centres — has seen the emergence of a new location of resistance. No longer do struggles take place just in the communities of the metropolitan centres — indeed the new undocumented, in their flight from the new world order, are only just forming settled communities themselves. And for many of the undocumented, the main community they experience is behind the barbed wire of detention. Removal centres are now places of frequent hunger strikes. They are venues of non-cooperation. And occasionally (like Yarls Wood) they have been razed to the ground by those detained within what were once their walls. But again there is really nothing absolutely new in immigration controls and the struggle against them. After the outbreak of war in 1914, ‘aliens’, including many Jews, were interned at Cunningham Camp on the Isle of Man, where at least one demonstration was organised against the conditions there. Again in 1940, during the Second World War, Jewish refugees detained — again as ‘enemy aliens’! — in Warth Mill in Bury organised protest meetings and hun-ger strikes. Struggle against controls is simply a continuum through time.

87

VI: The Effect on the Unions of Post-1945 Self-Organisation

Escalation in self-organisation and self-activity since the early 1960s has undoubtedly had significant, if contradictory, effects on the wider trade union and labour movement.

One effect has been the demand for the repeal of par-ticular pieces of control legislation. This itself is a unique phenomenon. It began as a periodic, if unacknowledged, response to the second wave of resistance — that led by black ‘new commonwealth’ citizens. It started at the TUC’s 1973 Congress when it passed a resolution calling on ‘the next Labour Government to repeal the 1971 Immigration Act’. This resolution was proposed by the Civil and Public Services Association. It was particularly progressive in that it also opposed the start of the postwar link between immi-gration status and welfare entitlement and ‘the proposed use of officers of Health and Social Security in the invidious role of examining immigrant passports to determine their validity or otherwise, and thus becoming part of the law enforcement process…’.

88

86. There was a lull (though not a cessation) in individual anti-deportation campaigns after 1988 following the spectacular de-

struction of the church sanctuary of Viraj Mendis. However, within a few years, refugees and others reproduced this con-sistency of anti-deportation campaigns. See note 85.

87. On Cunningham Camp and Warth Mill, see S Cohen, From The Jews To The Tamils, Manchester, 1988. For more on Cunning-ham Camp, see P and L Gillman, Collar the Lot!: How Britain

Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees, London, 1980, pp 13-14.

88. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Fifth Congress, 1973,

p 585. The resolution is reproduced in full in Miles and

The resolution was seconded by a speaker from the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. The AUEW delegate made the point that the intention of the Immigra-tion Act was clear:

It is to create a pool of labour without basic demo-cratic or civil rights constantly facing the threat of deportation. It is the classic contract-labour system and will have the effect of driving a wedge between groups of workers.89

Since the third wave of resistance — that led by refugees — the TUC has made a criticism — in whole or in part — of the plethora of immigration control legislation enacted throughout the 1990s and in the first years of the twenty-first century.

90 This includes a criticism of employer sanc-

tions, when first enacted in the 1996 Asylum and Immigra-tion Act. These objections cumulatively do represent a seri-ous, if hardly acknowledged,

91 shift in the TUC’s thinking

on controls compared to previous periods when it was a powerful advocate of the strengthening of restrictions. They are a vindication of the self-activity of undocumented workers and the effect this can have.

Another consequence of self-organisation has been to go beyond this call for repeal of specifics — and to argue for a principled position of no controls. This occurred twice in 1989: at the NALGO (now Unison) and NAPO (the proba-tion workers’ union) annual general meetings. Both resolu-tions arose directly from specific campaigns with a strong base within the respective unions. In respect of NALGO, this was the campaign centred in Birmingham in defence of Mohammed Idrish, a militant Bangladeshi social worker who was vigorously supported by the Black Members Group within the union. In respect of NAPO, it arose from the Campaign Against Double Punishment.

92 This was a

campaign against the deportation of non-British citizens convicted of a criminal offence — and which itself arose out of the anti-deportation campaign in defence of Andy An-derson.

93 Now, nearly 20 years later, with the failure of this

particular campaign and the increased stranglehold of con-trols, there is a parliamentary, press and popular demand for the tightening up of double punishment — all of which is an advert not for passivity but for increased struggle.

94

After 1989, there was a period of nearly two decades in which no union was to reproduce positions against all con-

Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers and New Commonwealth Immigration, p 43 n 65.

89. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Fifth Congress, 1973,

p 587. 90. See Avci and McDonald, ‘Chipping Away at the Fortress’. 91. But see Avci and McDonald, ‘Chipping Away at the Fortress’,

for such an acknowledgement. Though they emphasise the change in the TUC, yet nowhere is there acknowledged the self-activity of undocumented workers that forced this switch.

92. The manifesto of the Campaign Against Double Punishment, S Cohen, Sex and Drugs and Immigration Control: The Double Punishment and Deportation of Black Prisoners, was reprinted

in Immigration and Nationality Law and Practice, Volume 6, no 3.

93. The campaign produced a pamphlet A Long Sharp Shock. This

was produced jointly with Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit. A copy is available in the Race Relations Archive at the University of Manchester.

94. See Guardian, 3 May 2006.


12

trols — a gap which at least in its early period reflected a brief down-turn in the number and militancy of anti-deportation campaigns following the violent destruction of the Viraj Mendis campaign by the police who broke into a church sanctuary. More recently, the renewed struggles of the undocumented has inspired the NAFTHE (teachers in higher education) conference in 2005 to adopt a position essentially opposed in principle to controls. A significant political corollary to this resolution was the decision by the Standing Orders Committee to the National Union of Jour-nalists conference in 2006 to reject a resolution calling for ‘benign’ immigration controls — the rejection being on the grounds that such a formulation has no meaning. The con-ference itself then adopted a resolution opposing all con-trols. These decisions were taken at a point in political time when exiled journalists had begun organising within the union, and when the union had launched a national cam-paign in defence of one of its members — Mansoor Hassan, a Pakistani journalist.

A major significance of campaigns against deportation resides not so much in formal resolutions, but in the fact that they have provided a springboard for discussion about immigration controls into ever-widening sections of the trade union movement. So today it is quite usual for trade union bodies, often at national level, to support individual campaigns. Moreover, just as resistance by the undocu-mented has extended beyond anti-deportation campaigns, so this has forced sections of the trade union movement to support the struggle on other fronts. For example, there was an outcry by asylum seekers against their removal from the cash economy through the introduction of vouchers, ‘Monopoly Money’, in the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act. Bill Morris, General Secretary of the TGWU and the first black leader of a union, became prominent in this suc-cessful campaign.

95 He described the vouchers as creating

‘retailing apartheid’,96

and was supported in this by what the Guardian called a ‘powerful alliance of trade unions and [Labour Party] activists’.

97

VII: The Triumph of Reaction

However, there exists a contradiction within all this opposi-tion. And within the contraction there has triumphed a far more reactionary position. On the one hand, those few iso-lated but very important resolutions calling the complete opposition to controls have so far remained just paper aspi-rations. In particular, no political activity resulted from the two union resolutions passed in 1989 against controls. For instance, neither of the unions involved, nor their succes-sors, have campaigned against the transformation of em-ployers into Home Office immigration control spies by pe-nalising those who employ labour without the ‘correct’ im-migration status. In practice, unions should instruct their members in personnel (human resources) departments not to cooperate in asking employees to identify their status. Again the resolution against controls within the local gov-ernment union NALGO did not result in support by the

95. Though vouchers have been reintroduced for failed asylum seekers under section 4 of the 1999 legislation.

96. Guardian Unlimited, 3 October 2001. Also see Guardian, 28 and 29 September 2000 and the resolution by the TGWU against voucher scheme leading to a government review.

97. Guardian Unlimited, 3 October 2001.

union for non-cooperation, non-collusion by its members with immigration controls. Such refusal to collude would have done much to halt the crucial link between immigra-tion status and welfare entitlement — a link which perhaps finds its strongest location in respect of local authority pro-vision. But when it came to the crunch, NALGO’s successor union, Unison, voted at its 1996 conference against a reso-lution on non-compliance — even though one delegate protested: ‘Our members are being asked to act as immigra-tion officers. It’s not a job they applied to do.’

98 There is a

lesson here for the two unions, NAFTHE and the NUJ, who have recently adopted a position opposing all controls — the lesson being that this position has to be put into prac-tice through struggle, otherwise it has no meaning. Various trade union organisations, trades councils and union branches have now sponsored a pamphlet produced by the No One Is Illegal group (Workers’ Control Not Immigration Control) which suggests how such a struggle may be waged and the specific demands under which it may be raised. This is reproduced as Appendix 1 to my book Standing on the Shoulders of Fascism: From Immigration Control to the Strong State.

However, the overwhelming response by unions to the self-organisation of the undocumented has not been to adopt a principled position against controls. Rather it has been to accept the principle of controls and to argue that there can be fair controls. The AUEW delegate at the 1973 TUC Conference in seconding the motion against the Im-migration Act declared:

Of course the [trade union] movement supports the right of any state to frame immigration laws and regulations, but in the interests of this movement and all working people, such laws must be non-discriminatory as regards, race, colour, sex or reli-gion.99

Again, at the 1990 TUC Congress, NALGO presented a reso-lution based on its own agreed opposition to all controls. The General Council managed to get the motion with-drawn. Instead, it produced its own Statement on Racism and Immigration. Ron Todd, speaking on behalf of the Gen-eral Council, said:

We support the Labour Party’s plans to replace the 1971, 1981 and 1988 Immigration Acts with rules and practices which no longer discriminate on the grounds of race and sex. But we have to be clear that this is not the same as outright repeal.100

Revealingly, this faith in a non-discriminatory version of immigration controls echoes the almost identical wording of the Immigration Rules themselves — rules that deny entry, detain and deport, rules that split families, rules that are misogynist and homophobic as well as racist, rules which result in killings and suicides, rules which state:

Immigration Officers, Entry Clearance Officers and all staff of the Home Office Immigration and Na-

98. S Cohen, Immigration Controls, The Family and the Welfare State, London, 2001, p 308.

99. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Fifth Congress, 1973, p 587.

100. TUC, Report of the One Hundred and Twenty-Second Congress,

1990, p 472.


13

tionality Directorate will carry out their duties with-out regard to the race, colour or religion of persons seeking to enter or remain in the United Kingdom.

101

Put at its most generous, this belief in fair controls is self-delusion on behalf of the trade union movement. When propounded by political parties — both Labour

102 and Tory

— it is a cynical manoeuvre. It is invariably linked to the preposterous equation of ‘fair but firm’ controls. This is the equation used to justify every obscenity from Old Labour’s call when in opposition — in 1987 — for a quota on spouses to be allowed entry,

103 to New Labour’s enactment when in

power of four major pieces of restrictive legislation in seven years.

104 As such it can only be viewed as a manoeuvre to

divert the struggle being led by anti-deportation cam-paigns, by the self-organisation of the undocumented. This is a struggle in which the political logic is the abolition of all controls.

This political alignment with the concept of ‘fair’ con-trols, this refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of a battle against controls in principle, ties the hands of the trade union movement in fighting the consequences of immigration controls on the shop floor — of which oppos-ing employer sanctions and not colluding with internal controls are just two examples. It also leads it into further reactionary positions. A good example is the 2002 pam-phlet, Migrant Workers: A TUC Guide. The production of the pamphlet can itself be interpreted as a response to both 30 years of anti-deportation campaigns and also to the need by trade unions to boost falling membership through the recruitment of migrant workers. In many ways, the pam-phlet is factually useful — giving a good explanation of the relevant law — and progressive, in its support for anti-deportation campaigns. However, there is a political gap, a chasm, at the heart of the pamphlet. It makes the very ad-vanced statement that ‘the emphasis should be on protec-tion not protectionism’. This should mean protecting the conditions of migrant labour once here — and opposing all barriers against entry. But at no point does it even suggest a fight against controls in principle. It does not challenge the distinction between the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’. In fact, its obsession with wanting to stay within the law leads it into a dream world. It rhetorically proclaims: ‘Remember — all workers have rights!’

105 Unfortunately, this simply is not the

case for those defined by immigration controls as unwant-ed. These undocumented have no rights. They are literally outlaws. The only freedom for the outlaws of today and tomorrow is the abolition of the law itself — that is, the abolition of immigration law.

Unfortunately, much of the TUC’s criticism of aspects of control can itself be viewed as mere rhetoric — as a device

101. Statement of Change in the Immigration Rules, November 2003, HC 1224, rule 2.

102. The Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1987 general election said: ‘Labour’s policy of firm and fair immigration control will en-sure that the law does not discriminate on the basis of race,

colour or sex.’ 103. See Roy Hattersley’s contribution to the parliamentary debate

in November 1987 on the Immigration Bill.

104. Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, Asylum and Immigration Act 2004, Im-migration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006.

105. TUC, Migrant Workers: A TUC Guide, 2002, p 31.

intended to divert criticism of it from the undocumented. This can be seen in respect to employer sanctions. Though the TUC expressed some criticisms of this when first enact-ed, it has never called for the one piece of action that could destroy such sanctions — namely, the repudiation by work-ers in personnel departments of any role in asking prospec-tive employees their immigration status. Moreover, the whole credibility of the TUC is undermined by being a member, along with the Confederation of British Industry and other similar bodies, of the Home Office-chaired Illegal Working Stakeholder Group.

106 This body, as its name sug-

gests, is premised precisely on making a distinction and creating a division between the legal and the illegal — and controlling and criminalising the latter. And it is this body which has helped legitimise the latest strengthening of em-ployer sanctions in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationali-ty Act 2006.

VIII: International Trade Union and Labour

Reaction — Fortress World

Immigration controls are anti-international. They are in opposition to everything internationalism stands for. Yet they are internationally pervasive within the labour move-ment. There has been trade union and labour support glob-ally for immigration restrictions at significant historical points in time. How the USA is historically a minefield of such support has been well documented.

107

Immigration controls came to the USA over 25 years earlier than in the UK — in particular with the self-explanatory Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Foran Act of 1885, which abolished the importation of contract labour. During this period, labour and its organisations were organised in the Knights of Labour which was quasi-Masonic and had virtually disappeared by the end of the century and the American Federation of Labour (AFL) formed in 1886 and existing today as part of the AFL-CIO — the equivalent of the British TUC. The Knights of Labour agitated for both the above pieces of legislation — with the AFL being instrumental in the renewal of the Chinese Ex-clusion Act in 1892 and 1902. Indeed, between 1881 and 1897 there was not one year in which one or other of these or-ganisations did not demand further or more stringent con-trols. The start of the twentieth century saw labour move-ment support for the Congressional attempt to slash immi-gration by enacting a literary test — which became law in

106. The full membership according to the Home Office website (http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/ind/en/home/0/preventing_

illegal/steering_group_to.html) is the British Chamber of Commerce, the British Hospitality Association, the Commis-sion for Racial Equality, the Confederation of British Indus-

tries, the Construction Skills Certification Scheme, the Health and Safety Executive, J Sainsbury, the National Farmers Union, the NHS, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the

TUC, the Association of Labour Providers, the Scottish TUC. 107. For example as well as Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the

Labour Movement’ (dealing en passant with the Nazi period),

see AT Lane, ‘American Trade Unions, Mass Immigration and the Literacy Test, 1900-1917’, Labor History, Volume 25, no 1, 1984; C Collomp, ‘Unions, Civics and National Identity: Organ-

ised Labor’s Reaction to Immigration, 1881-1897’, Labour Histo-ry, Volume 29, no 4, 1988; SM Lyman, ‘The “Chinese Question” and American Labor Historians’, New Politics, Volume 7, no 4,

2000.


14

1917. Between 1906 and 1917, the AFL voted for resolutions in favour of the literacy test on no fewer than 10 occa-sions.

108 The leading writer on trade union support for the

test has stated:

It is widely recognised that in the first two decades of this century the American Federation of Labor was among the most important pressure groups seeking tougher United States’ immigration con-trols.

109

Within these formative years — formative for both immi-gration controls and the organised labour movement — it was the iconic figure of the Chinese that was central in the simultaneous construction and damnation of the alien. Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labour, advo-cated a boycott of Chinese-made products, and called on white labour to engage in a new war of independence, until ‘the hated Mongol shall be driven from our shores and until the banner of requited labor shall ride the breeze of Eman-cipated America’.

110

At the Knights’ conference in 1896, the Chinese were described as ‘dirty’, ‘rice or rat eaters’ of the ‘yellow cloud of ruin’.

111 There was a racist obsession with the Chinese diet

as emblematic of the unwanted Chinese themselves. John Swinton, the East Coast labour journalist, described the supposed conflict between Chinese and white workers as being between the ‘roast rat against the roast beef’.

112 The

AFL’s long-term President, Sam Gompers, wrote a pam-phlet in 1902 entitled Meat Versus Rice: American Manhood versus Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?.

Gompers had first established his own political base in the anti-Chinese Cigar Makers International Union. This union initiated at least one campaign to break a strike by Chinese cigar makers.

113 Gompers himself represented the

worst kind of bureaucratic leadership. He himself was a Jewish immigrant from England who reacted to the arrival of Russian Jews — a proportion of whom became cigar makers — with a plea to the 1891 AFL conference for ‘relief from this pressing evil’.

114

The racism of the USA labour movement is illustrated by the startling figure that at one period post-1920: ‘At least 31 of the AFL’s affiliates as well as most of the railway brotherhoods barred Negroes from membership.’

115 In 1894,

108. Lane, ‘American Trade Unions, Mass Immigration and the

Literacy Test’, p 6. 109. Ibid, p 5. Lane also records (p 24n) that the following unions

‘continued to advocate the recruitment of foreign-born work-

ers as an alternative to tough immigration restrictions — the Coopers, the Painters and Decorators, the Brewery Workers and the Ladies Garment Workers’.

110. Collomp, ‘Unions, Civics and National Identity’, p 465. 111. Ibid, p 464. 112. Lyman, ‘The “Chinese Question” and American Labor Histori-

ans’. 113. C Berlet and M Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, New

York and London, 2000, p 67.

114. J Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, New Jersey, 1988, p 71. On this occasion, the AFL convention did not endorse Gompers.

115. R Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985, Bal-timore, 1986, p 82, quoted in Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 297 n 20. The date for the infor-

mation is not given, but presumably is after 1920.

the Knights called for the deportation of all black people to Africa.

116 However, the Chinese were the Jews of early

American control agitation — they were the satanic figure, the demonised other, the grand conspirator. Perhaps the most startling quote came from a San Franciscan labour newspaper after a bubonic plague scare in 1900: ‘The al-mond-eyed Mongolian is watching for his opportunity, waiting to assassinate you and your children with one of his many maladies.’

117

But Jews too were depicted as occupying their tradi-tional role as the international Satan. Madison Grant in his popular and hugely influential 1916 work The Passing of the Great Race, condemned Jews for ‘mongrelizing’ the nation. At the post-war Nuremberg Trials, Grant’s book was intro-duced into evidence by the defence for Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia pro-gram, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich and show they were not ideologically unique to Nazi Germany. Not surprisingly the legal defence didn’t work — Brandt was sentenced to death.

Grant’s writings were part of the campaign that eventu-ally led to the imposition of quotas on immigration from South and East Europe in the 1924 Immigration Act (the Johnson-Reed Act). The Act was part of a postwar upsurge in demands for restrictions which the leading writer on the issue has described as having ‘a drastic quality inconceiva-ble in the decades before the war’ with a ‘severity that had little precedent’.

118 This was a reflection of the same reac-

tion that flourished in the UK and which assumed legisla-tive form with the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act of 1919. The 1924 statute was supported by Gompers, who threw himself into the rising super-nationalist ideology of ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’,

119 and ‘embraced the

idea that European immigration endangered America’s racial foundations’.

120 Bizarrely, this predates the parallel

nationalism expressed by some British trade unions in re-sponse to Walter Citrine’s questionnaire, in which the GMWU asked: ‘Do we want in this homogeneous country our little USAs, our little Germanys, our little Italys, or even our little Czechoslavakias?’

121

It was the 1924 Reed-Johnson legislation that was sub-sequently used to exclude Jewish refugees wanting to flee Nazism. And it was this legislation which the AFL contin-ued to uphold during the Nazi period. For example, in 1935 the International Ladies Garment Workers Union proposed a resolution to the annual AFL conference calling for the facilitation of refugee entry. The AFL leadership declared that this ‘would run counter to the immigration laws now in existence as a result of the activities of the American Federation of Labor’.

122

XI: Lessons To Be Drawn

Several lessons can be drawn, or confirmed, from the histo-

116. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism In America, p 64. 117. Ibid, p 65. 118. Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp 304-05.

119. See ibid, pp 204-20 on 100 per cent Americanism generally, and pp 305-06 on support by Gompers.

120. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 64

quoting Higham, Strangers in the Land, Athenium edition, 1978.

121. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 79.

122. Ibid, p 68.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Brandt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-4_Euthanasia_Program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-4_Euthanasia_Program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany


15

ry of the response to refugees and others of the undocu-mented in the UK and USA.

The first lesson is the importance of history itself — and of retrieving history. Without this retrieval the present simply cannot be understood. This is not a trivial truism. The lack of historical understanding has political conse-quences. For instance, there can be a (literal) white-wash by default of the role of those who played reactionary roles — the scoundrels of history. Walter Citrine of the TUC is one example of a person of power and influence. During the war he, a supposed working-class leader, received a knight-hood and in 1947 was made a peer. He is well known for the bureaucratic manual he wrote on the chairing of meet-ings.

123 But his more important legacy is his ambivalent but

ultimately reactionary attitude towards the entry of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.

124 In circulating affiliated trade

unions for their views on asylum seekers, he gave his own opinion as being that any help given ‘would have to be made so that the livelihood of our own people is not en-dangered’, and that he would ‘safeguard the interests of our people’. In addressing the AFL in wartime 1940, he said that ‘people in our movement have a very close affinity. Our people are drawn basically from the same stock.’ Phrases such as ‘our people’ and ‘same stock’ reek of a nationalism and, even worse, a eugenicism that have had dramatic con-sequences in legitimising immigration controls and in the devastation such controls have caused, not least to working people.

Another consequence of the failure to retrieve history is that those who fought reaction become so dead and buried that their struggle — including the ideas for which they struggled — simply become ignored. They become tram-pled on. The outstanding example of this is those trade unionists who as long ago as 1895 showed in their pam-phlet, A Voice From the Aliens, why it is necessary to op-pose immigration controls in their totality. In spite of this early resistance, we have arrived at a situation over a centu-ry later where the absolutely dominant position within the labour movement is to regard as ‘progressive’ the ac-ceptance of controls in principle and to argue for their ame-lioration.

The second lesson from all this history relates to the question of how to present the argument against immigra-tion control today, and the need to do this in a principled and not some supposed pragmatic manner. Some unions in some periods have opposed some aspects of controls. But their opposition has rarely been on a principled basis, thus allowing their opposition to turn to support. An illustrative example from the UK is the former Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers in relation to commonwealth immi-gration control.

125 The AUFW was strongly influenced by its

Communist Party members. Its conference in 1962 derided and defeated in a vote a resolution from its West Midland’s District Committee calling for backing to be given to the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill — even suggesting that the bill be strengthened by making health checks compul-sory and making an offer of a job and accommodation a

123. W Citrine, The ABC Of Chairmanship, London, 1939.

124. All following quotes are from Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 88.

125. Duffield, ‘Rationalisation and the Politics of Segregation,

pp 160-62.

condition of entry. But in 1966 the union changed its posi-tion and called for controls. It has been cogently argued that the reasons for opposition were premised on the same political assumptions as the reasons for support. These as-sumptions related to the job market and the availability or otherwise of jobs. Thus the reasons for initial opposition to controls were purely economistic. In 1962, it was argued in opposition to controls that there was under-employment. In 1966, it was argued there was over-employment. It has been correctly said:

It is because the left and right wings of the AUFW shared the same ideological terrain that the union in 1966 could with equanimity reverse its position on the question of immigration.

126

This ideological terrain is reproduced today by people who contest the assertion that controls cause unemployment by arguing that job vacancies presently exist. This argument then becomes refutable in periods of no job vacancies. The AUFW experience shows the real danger of ever making concessions to the principle of controls

X: Conclusion — More Lessons

A crucial lesson of the history of the relationship of trade unions to immigration controls relates again to the ques-tion of self-organisation, or rather the lack of it, in the peri-od after Nazism came to power in 1933. In both the UK and the USA there was no shift or amelioration whatsoever in trade union support for control after the fascists assumed power. The general trade union position in respect to the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazism was consistently reactionary and was not articulated in any other way. There was never even raised the demand for ‘fair’ controls in any significant manner. And the reason for this was that the labour movement’s historic support for control was not challenged by organised pressure from below.

The political configuration in the UK in the critical pe-riod from the ascendancy of Hitlerism lay precisely in the lack of national or even local Jewish movements agitating against controls from below. Only a grassroots political movement, rooted in the predominantly working-class Jew-ish community, visible on the streets, consistently challeng-ing supporters of controls and reaching out to potential allies, continually presenting itself as a danger to the ideo-logical and political status quo, could have pushed the trade unions into fighting to open the borders. But such a movement never emerged. Reliance was placed instead on the ability of so-called community leaders to persuade the government through deputations to ministers and literary criticism

127 — as useless a tactic then as it is now if divorced

from public campaigning. In the East End of London, there did exist the Jewish People’s Council — but this devoted its energy to combating home-grown fascism, as shown by its heroic role in the famous Battle of Cable Street in 1936.

128

The one other organisation that could have changed mat-ters — the Communist Party with its large Jewish member-ship and roots in the labour movement — seems to have abstained from the struggle to gain entry for Jews fleeing

126. Ibid, p 162. 127. London, Whitehall and the Jews, passim. 128. J Jacobs, Out Of The Ghetto, London, 1991 (originally published

1977).


16

fascism.129

On the one hand, it did campaign for Republican refugees escaping Spain during the Civil War, yet, on the other, like the trade unions, in which its influence would have been felt, its support for those fleeing Hitlerism was limited to political activists. Louise London has observed:

Political refugees held a special attention for the Left, the Labour Party and trade union circles. These groups responded sympathetically to the plight of the left-wing opposition in Germany and Austria, and felt concern over the fate of social democratic opponents of German claims to Czechoslovakia’s territory. The British left had been actively involved in the Spanish Civil War and aid to Spanish refu-gees. Eleanor Rathbone MP was tirelessly active on behalf of refugees from both political and racial per-secution. Generally however, the Left tended to fo-cus on political cases.

130

The bizarre conclusion of all this is that today, as for the last 30 years, there has been a far larger grassroots move-ment against controls in the UK than there ever was in the 1930s. And it is this movement which is today pushing trade unions into re-evaluating controls, at least to some extent, and which in the 1930s was characterised by its absence.

The story in the USA was somewhat different. At the time of the Nazi period there was brought into existence a mass Jewish organisation, rooted in the labour movement, which was in a position to campaign for free entry and to exert potentially massive influence on the trade unions. This was the American Jewish Labor Committee.

131 The JLC

was founded in February 1934 at a meeting of over 1000 delegates. It represented the coordinated activities of the American Jewish labour force, which numbered several hundred thousand.

132 Its main purpose was the unification

129. Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 87, has found a reference to support for refugees by the National

Unemployed Workers Movement — in many ways a Com-munist Party front organisation — from 1939 with the NUWM stressing ‘assistance to the refugees neither injures British un-

employed nor can displace British labour… We wish to make it quite clear that the victims of Fascism abroad and the victims of hunger at home are not enemies.’ (‘Unemployed Repudiate

Fascist Propaganda — Refugees Not Our Enemy’, Jewish Chronicle, 3 February 1939) However, by 1939 the NUWM was in decline, and anyhow there is no evidence that it actively

campaigned for opening the gates to refugees. 130. London, Whitehall and the Jews, p 130. 131. On the reaction to controls by Jewish labour organisations in

the Nazi period, see for example G Berlin, ‘The Jewish Labor Committee and American Immigration Policy in the 1930s’, Studies In Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature in Hon-

our of I Edward Kiev, New York, 1971. See also G Malmgreen, ‘Labor and the Holocaust: The Jewish Labor Committee and the Anti-Nazi Struggle’, Labor’s Heritage, October 1991. This

seems, by default, to confirm Berlin’s thesis in that it makes no mention of the JLC’s struggling against controls. On attitudes of Jewish communal organisations generally to the issue see D

Brody, ‘American Jewry, the Refugees and Immigration Re-striction (1932-1942)’, Publication of the American Jewish His-torical Society, Volume 45, 1955-56.

132. According to Berlin, the delegates ‘represented the Interna-tional Ladies Garment Workers Union; Amalgamated Clothing Workers International Union; Workmen’s Circle, United He-

brew Trades, Forward Association; Jewish Socialist Verband;

and advancement of anti-Nazi activities in the USA. How-ever, one of its explicitly stated goals was: ‘To fight for the right of free immigration in all countries, including Pales-tine.’

133 Nonetheless the leading authority on the JLC and

immigration restriction has concluded:

What is clear is that during the decade of the 1930s, the Labor Committee did not call for legislation re-form that would have enabled more immigrants to enter the country.

134

The explanation given for this ‘can be understood only in the light of the policy of the AFL’.

135 The AFL was one of the

chief backers of the Labor Committee and it brought its power and influence to bear on it — and in particular acted as a block on its advocating open doors to refugees.

136 And

yet this is a clear historic occasion when the self-organisation of the oppressed appeared to have had the numerical strength and organisational base to challenge the reactionary politics of the native labour movement. Ulti-mately, the demand for free entry into Palestine, which was AFL policy, was used to divert the possibility of a struggle against free entry into the USA.

137

Unfortunately, the negative experience of both the UK and the USA demonstrates the power of self-organisation in reverse. In the absence of the active self-organisation, that is of self-organisation in struggle, of those most affected by controls, there will be no change in the level of the labour movement’s support for controls and consequently on the level of the state’s sanctioning of controls. Self-organisation which exists only on paper — or in cyberspace — is a con-tradiction in terms. And it has no political weight.

The final lesson to be drawn, particularly but not exclu-sively from the US experience, relates to the profound rela-tionship between the ideology of controls and the ideology of trade unionism itself. The leading student of the agita-tion by the organised labour movement of the USA for con-trols at the time of the birth of controls has written: ‘Orga-nized labor’s policy was not an epiphenomenon but rather a directly constitutive element of its formation and ideolo-gy.’

138

In other words, the defining feature of the US labour movement in its formative stage was established, via its active backing for immigration controls at their birth, as chauvinistic and nationalistic. Arguably exactly the same can be said about the UK. In both cases it explains as not extraordinary, but rather as predictable, the support for controls both during the period of Nazism and the support for controls today. Also in both cases, indeed in every case, it shows the utter futility and political counter-productive-

Jewish Workers Party; Left Poale-Zion)’. Not all unions with

dominant or large Jewish membership were formal members (Berlin, ‘The Jewish Labor Committee and American Immigra-tion Policy in the 1930s’, p46).

133. Ibid, p 70 n 6. 134. Ibid, p 71 n 21. 135. Ibid, p 49.

136. On the relationship between the JLC and AFL and the influ-ence of the AFL on the JLC, see also Kushner, ‘Nazi Persecution and the Labour Movement’, p 298 n 26.

137. For the JLC/AFL and Palestine, see Berlin, ‘The Jewish Labor Committee and American Immigration Policy in the 1930s’, pp 60-62.

138. Collomp, ‘Unions, Civics and National Identity’, p 452.


17

ness of arguing within the labour movement for any idea that controls can themselves be somehow rendered non-nationalist and fairer. Any acceptance of the principle of controls means accepting retrospectively the very chauvin-

ism that became inbuilt within the modern trade union movement at its inception. The only principled position is to struggle to break from this chauvinism — which is essen-tially a struggle for an ideological rebirth.

Mike Jones

HC Hansen — CIA

IN June 2008, historian Peer Henrik Hanson publically revealed the results of research he had been undertaking for his PhD which showed that the prominent Danish Social Democrat Hans Christian Hansen had from 1943 until his death in 1960 been a CIA agent or informant.

HC Hansen was born into a poor working-class family, had to leave school and find a job after seven years’ educa-tion, but threw himself into activity in the labour movement, thus by the beginning of the 1930s he was president of the Social Democrat Youth. HC Hansen was bitterly anti-communist, as was quite normal within Social Democracy in Denmark which, since the previous youth section had broken with the party in 1919 and would become a component of the then tiny Communist Party, has never had any left wing, and opposed any joint anti-fascist or other activity with the Communist Party during the 1930s. The same attitude was dominant during the German occupation and through-out the Cold War years.

When Denmark was occupied on 9 April 1940, the Social Democrat–Social Liberal coalition took three members each of the Conservative and Liberal Parties into the government. This government was one of accommodation as were those that followed until a wave of strikes in the summer of 1943, and a German demand for the adoption of the death penalty for saboteurs, led to a state of emergency being declared and direct rule imposed but through the Danish ad-ministration.

The Communist Party had been declared illegal with the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The parliament adopted a law contrary to the constitution and forbad communist activity, while many leading party cadres were interned. The Hitler–Stalin Pact had discredited the Communist Party somewhat, but its role in the resistance gained it considerable support.

When the collaborationist government dissolved itself in 1943, HC Hansen got involved in the resistance move-ment, but his activity was not so much anti-Nazi but more anti-communist, with the aim of preventing an armed Communist Party takeover at the end of the war.

By the end of the war, HC Hansen had become one of the Social Democratic Party’s leaders, and was finance minis-ter in the first postwar coalition, a post he would hold in subsequent Social Democrat-led coalitions. Already during the occupation, HC Hansen had established contact with US intelligence agent Adolf Lium in Stockholm, the man who would become the head of US intelligence in Denmark after the war.

HC Hansen had told Lium that he wanted the US to play a key role in postwar Denmark and to replace Britain’s role, particularly in the economic sphere. Peer Henrik Hansen found Lium’s report in the US National Archive in Wash-ington DC. He also found confidential lists of ‘Agents & Contacts’, and from May 1946, HC Hansen is registered under the code-name ‘Big Horn’.

It emerged some years ago that HC Hansen had played a role in establishing a private anti-communist intelligence outfit in the late 1940s, which not only gathered intelligence for the US, but possessed US weapons and explosives, to be used in the case of a Soviet occupation. This outfit illegally bugged the home of the Vice-Chairman of the Com-munist Party Alfred Jansen during 1952-59. Jansen had been a minister in the first postwar coalition, and was still an MP during the bugging period.

In January 1955, the Social Democratic Prime Minister Hans Hedtoft died suddenly. HC Hansen had been foreign minister but, while keeping that post, he also took over as Prime Minister, and he kept both posts until his death in 1960. It emerged later that without consulting anyone at all, and contrary to his own party’s and the country’s position, in 1957 HC Hansen had given the US permission to keep nuclear weapons at their base in Thule, Greenland. It is not known whether he handed over government documents or received payment for his activity, but one could liken his role to that of those who believed that the Soviet Union was better placed to look after the interests of their country; rather than place faith in his own nation to know best what was in its national interest, he believed that another nation could do it better.


18

The Campaign for a Marxist Party: An Autopsy

The Editorial Board of New Interventions agreed to sponsor the formation of the Campaign for a Marxist Party, without necessarily endorsing any organisation which emerged from it. Several members of the Edi-torial Board went on to join the CMP, and to play an active role within it. However, a general meeting of the CMP on 6 December 2008 voted to dissolve the organisation. We present here three assessments of the CMP experience. Analyses by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, written from their pro-dissolution standpoint, can be found in the Weekly Worker for 4 and 11 December 2008.

Phil Sharpe

Understanding the CMP’s Demise1

HE Campaign for a Marxist Party (CMP) has lasted less than two years. It has not been able to fulfil expecta-

tions that it could mobilise forces in favour of the for-mation of a Marxist party. Instead the history of the CMP was characterised by constant crisis and faction fighting, and the promise of its formation has not been realised. The CMP was based around three major groupings: the Com-munist Party of Great Britain (CPGB); the Critique Sup-porters Group (CSG); and the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA). This meant that the practical success of the CMP depended upon the ability of these three groupings to work together. In other words, if the CMP was to appeal to the left and the working class, it would have to be able to show in practice that it was capable of developing a democratic culture of discussion combined with the capacity to realise modest practical goals. In this sense the CMP would be able to represent the forces of a potential party, or the possibil-ity to represent an alternative to the bureaucratic practices of the major organisations of the left. This was the aim of the CMP, but it remained unfulfilled because of the inabil-ity of the various forces of the CMP to work together in a mutually harmonious manner.

The CMP was established in the summer of 2006, and its inauguration was fairly successful. It was able to agree a collection of principles summed up by the understanding that the role of political organisation was to promote the self-emancipation of labour. Hence, the CMP understood that its role was not to facilitate the development of a left

1. Phil Sharpe is a member of the Democratic Socialist Alliance,

but this article is written in a personal capacity.

party that would be similar to the left parties of the past. Instead, the aim of the CMP was to realise the combination of democracy and principled programme in a coherent or-ganisational form. The CMP was meant to promote an an-swer to the crisis of the Marxist left, and to suggest answers to its bureaucratic stagnation and marginalisation from the working class. Why was the CMP not able to realise these aims?

Reasons for Failing

Firstly, the CMP failed to develop a perspective that could situate its chances of success within the unfavourable cli-mate of the retreat of Marxism and the decline of the left. For example, Hillel Ticktin of the CSG propagated the op-timistic doctrine that with the decline of Stalinism the pro-spects to develop a new Marxist party would be favourable. The reality was that the formation of the CMP had not en-hanced this possibility, and instead it was struggling to survive in a hostile environment. This reality was not rec-ognised by Ticktin, nor by his allies in the CPGB. The result was the generation of a blame culture, which led to the inaugural Committee of the CMP being blamed for its ap-parent inability to make progress. Consequently, destruc-tive faction fighting became a common characteristic of the CMP.

Secondly, the Weekly Worker, the party organ of the CPGB, became used as the means to oppose the leadership of the CMP. The problem was not that differences were being argued about, but rather that these differences were being used to undermine the credibility of one particular faction of the CMP, the DSA. As a result the suggestion was being made that only changes in the composition of the Committee of the CMP could enable it to thrive and make progress. The leadership of the CMP was being character-ised as anarcho-bureaucratic and incompetent. Calls for the formation of a professional committee became incessant, and such calls were connected to the attempt to portray the existing Committee as a bunch of drunks. Eventually, this vilification was successful and a new Committee was elect-ed, but the apparent decline of the CMP was not reversed; instead it was accelerated. The new Committee failed to arrange any public meetings or educationals, and was reluc-tant to issue any public material. Indeed, the attempt to develop a manifesto only led to disagreements within the Committee. The result was a failure to produce a coherent manifesto for discussion by the membership of the CMP. This was the moment at which the new CMP leadership called for the demise of the CMP. The blame for the appar-ent failure of the CMP was directed against the DSA, and the existing Committee of the CMP refused to accept any responsibility for this debacle.

What were the issues utilised by the Committee to

T


19

blame the DSA for the demise of the CMP? Firstly, the John Pearson affair. It was alleged that John Pearson uttered a threat of violence against Lyndon White at the Winter 2007 CMP conference. Then it was claimed that the DSA refused to cooperate with an inquiry into this affair. This claim was rejected by the DSA. The DSA argued that the implementa-tion of a code of conduct within the CMP would create the appropriate conditions for the investigation of this matter. Failure to agree such a code would mean that John Pearson would not be treated with fairness. Unfortunately, the stubborn refusal of the Committee to contemplate the ne-cessity of such a process led to problems which could not be resolved. As a result John Pearson, with DSA support, could not apologise to what he considered to be a kangaroo court. If accountability and transparency had been imple-mented in the procedures of the CMP, this affair would have been dealt with more amicably.

The Myth of the Halfway House

However, it is absurd to blame the demise of the CMP on the tensions of this development. But this was how the sit-uation was interpreted by the Committee of the CMP. They argued that an intolerable atmosphere had been created within the CMP, and therefore the only alternative was to argue for its dissolution. In this subjective manner the CMP Committee glossed over the necessity of a detailed analysis of all the important reasons for the decline of the CMP, and instead preferred to focus on personality issues. This stand-point was combined with the second reason given for blam-ing the DSA for the demise of the CMP. The CPGB argued at the conference which dissolved the CMP, that the DSA had supported ‘halfway houses’ — or the call for parties that were not Marxist and Communist. It was claimed that any call for a workers’ party represented a rejection of the principled call for a Communist party. The idea was, appar-ently, that it was not possible to reconcile those who were for a Communist party with those who favoured the half-way house approach, an approach which was supposedly connected with the views of Phil Sharpe of the DSA.

The CPGB’s argument was entirely spurious. The ques-tion of the principled status of workers’ parties, or other-wise, had never been systematically discussed by the CMP. Furthermore, all of the CMP was apparently united around the necessity to develop a Marxist party as an alternative to the limitations of the left. It was also formally agreed that a revolutionary programme would be essential for any prin-cipled Marxist and Communist party. The controversy around the issue of workers’ parties was a dispute started by the Weekly Worker about various formulations in Phil Sharpe’s proposed draft programme for the DSA. The result was that the fiction was created that the DSA was in favour of halfway houses, which were parties of a mass character based on rejection of a revolutionary programme. What this factional argumentation failed to recognise was that Phil Sharpe’s draft programme called for workers’ parties based on a revolutionary programme, or the classical ap-proach of Trotsky. In any event, the question of workers’ parties could have been fruitfully discussed within the CMP, and been an issue of clarification and education. In-stead, the issue was used to intensify the isolation of the DSA within the CMP. The actual purpose of the furore about halfway houses was to discredit Phil Sharpe’s draft programme as an alternative to the draft programme of the

CPGB. The real matter of dispute was the question of the differences between rival programmes. These differences could have become another educational issue within the CMP, and this was the approach of the original Committee of the CMP. But the Weekly Worker spread the view that any supporter of halfway houses was unacceptable within the CMP. This standpoint was wrong, because no confer-ence of the CMP actually developed a position on workers’ parties. The controversy was also ironic given the recent support of the Weekly Worker for the anti-capitalist party in France, which is a classic halfway house! Reality often undermines the pristine principles of dogma.

The point being made is that the differences within the CMP could have been utilised in a constructive manner to promote discussion around questions of programme, per-spectives and tactics. Instead a frenzied factional atmos-phere was created that suggested the DSA was an unprinci-pled and unnecessary part of the CMP. It was this atmos-phere that hindered the development of practical and con-structive relations within the CMP. In this context, the new Committee, based on the domination of the CPGB and Cri-tique, failed to use its majority to enhance the prospects of the CMP and instead was obsessed with slandering the role of the DSA. The DSA became portrayed as the monster that had caused the collapse of the CMP. This is a travesty of the truth. The truth was that the new Committee was unable to assume the duties and responsibilities of leadership, and therefore was unable to suggest any way forward for the CMP. In desperation, the CMP Committee called for the development of a manifesto, and yet was unable to accom-plish this task in a satisfactory manner. The result was a collapse of expectations and the generation of demoralisa-tion, and this meant the formation of the CMP began to be considered as premature. The Committee of the CMP agi-tated for the dissolution of the CMP at the very moment when new developments were indicating its continued rel-evance — such as the economic crisis and the split in the Socialist Workers Party. Possibilities to advance the devel-opment of a Marxist party were being created at the very moment of its demise. Modest progress could have been a feature of the next period. Instead, the blame culture of the CPGB and Ticktin has led to the liquidation of the CMP.

The DSA’s Standpoint

What was the attitude of the DSA in relation to the closure of the CMP? We refused to accept the demise of the CMP, but we were not merely negative. The DSA did not merely call for opposition to the closure, but we also suggested a way forward for the CMP. We argued that it would be pos-sible to discuss the respective merits of the proposed Mani-festos written both by members of the CMP Committee and Phil Sharpe. The discussion and comparison of these Mani-festos would provide the basis for development and elabo-ration of the perspectives of the CMP in the coming period. Furthermore, we were not against discussion of the various illusions and failures of the CMP, and we were eager to discuss how these limitations could be corrected. We un-derstood that the CMP could not make progress upon a diet of false optimism, and we were ready to work with others to establish more viable perspectives. The call was made for the re-establishment of unity within the CMP. This call was ignored by the Committee of the CMP — they had only one goal, which was to dissolve it. The future of


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the attempt to rebuild the struggle to advance the objec-tives of the CMP remains unclear. All that is left from the demise of the CMP is the attempt of Dave Craig to create a new international, revolutionary and democratic organisa-tion. These prospects to recreate something like the CMP have to be discussed.

Firstly, it is futile to refuse to accept the closure of the CMP. This development is unwelcome, but it has hap-pened, and so the flexible and non-dogmatic response is to work for a new alternative to the CMP. Some voices have been raised against the closure of the CMP, but they have little support. It is necessary to be more creative. The im-portant question that arises is how can we both incorporate the gains of the CMP and attempt to go beyond its limita-tions? How can the programmatic principles of the CMP — which envisage an open, democratic and flexible Marxism — be integrated into a new organisational form? For it is the issue of organisation that is acute in this context, be-cause it is entirely possible potentially to express the devel-opment of a principled Marxism, and yet for organisational limitations to result in these gains being negated. In a sense this condition explains the history of the CMP. On the one hand, principles were adopted that enabled the CMP to relate powerfully and cogently to the necessity to build a Marxist party. On the other hand, the organisational struc-tures of the CMP did not express these principles in a con-sistent manner. There was a contradiction between the democratic principles adopted and the organisational re-strictions that inhibited the fulfilment of these principles in the practice of the party. This resulted in the CMP becom-ing a replica of the other organisations of the left. Conse-quently, far from the CMP representing a political and or-ganisational alternative to the limitations of the other groups, it was instead just one more example of the crisis of the various Marxist parties.

The process of degeneration explained the failure of the CMP, because it was ultimately unable to offer an alterna-tive that was different from the other organisations of the left. Thus the issue of organisation was vital if the CMP was to be truly different from the other groups on the left. Yet this aspect was neglected. For example, was the party going to be democratic centralist, or was some alternative form of democracy the basis of its functioning? Failure to resolve this question meant that the CMP was ruled by committee, with a passive and inactive membership. The CMP was ef-fectively centralist, and lacking in the democratic participa-tion of the membership. Lofty proclamations of democratic centralism only added to the malaise. Hence, the CMP was never a Marxist organisation that challenged the limitations of the bureaucratised conception of the Leninist vanguard organisation. But the CMP also lacked any of the virtues of Leninism, and this meant it could not act as a superior al-ternative to the left in terms of either organisation or de-mocracy. What is more, the left began to see the CMP as an instrument of the CPGB, and this understanding was not discouraged by the actual actions of the CPGB. The failure to act on the basis of unity-in-diversity meant that the CMP was merely one more homogenous organisation, but which even worse was undermined by factionalism. In summa-tion, the CMP was part of the crisis of the left and not its answer.

What Can We Learn?

What can be learnt from the history of the CMP? Firstly, we still need an organisation like the CMP, but this organisa-tion has to be without its defects. To this end, we have to clarify what we mean by a Marxist party. To the CPGB, the character of a Marxist party was defined by the formation of the original CPGB in 1920, and they advocate a repeat of that experience. This standpoint represented the Leninist side of the spectrum, and as a result they called for an or-ganisation based on democratic centralism. On the other hand, various Independents, and the DSA in general, want-ed to develop a Marxist party, but there was a lack of clarity about what exactly this meant. Is a Marxist party a Leninist party, or is it organisationally and programmatically op-posed to a Leninist party? And what is the relationship of Trotskyism to these issues? The failure to resolve these questions meant that implicitly there was an untheorised contradiction between the supporters of a Marxist party and those of a Leninist party. This problem was further complicated by the fact that the CSG, which was implicitly Marxist rather than Leninist, provided political support to the CPGB. What could have been a natural majority for Marxism was transformed into an artificial majority for Leninism. The result was the formation of an inefficient Lenin-ist grouping, a situation which was satisfactory for nobody.

Secondly, it is not sufficient to elaborate programmatic principles. A collection of points is a good start, but they need to be consolidated and made precise in the form of a popular programme. At the very least, the programmatic principles should be transformed into a Manifesto that rep-resents an analysis of the economic and political situation. On this basis the CMP could and should have demarcated itself from the rest of the left. For example, what do we think of the theory of state capitalism for understanding the past and present, and is the degenerated workers’ state theory a satisfactory basis to characterise Stalinism? The failure to provide these types of answers meant that the CMP had a flimsy understanding of the history of Marxism, and so was unable to situate itself in relation to the task of building an International, such as the Fourth International. Such problems were not helped by the pragmatic approach of the CPGB, which argued that questions of programme are practical and not theoretical. This was an artificial con-trast, which tried to deny the theoretical content of practi-cal matters. The point is that the left could not reach con-clusions about the CMP because of the large gaps in its programmatic development. The theory of Hillel Ticktin was our only expression of theory, but this meant that Tick-tin’s unwillingness to engage with the questions that con-cern the left became an unwillingness that characterised the CMP. Superficially, the CMP had experts on political economy, and yet we were without a programme that could locate us in relation to the rest of the left. Was the CMP closer to the Socialist Party, or to the SWP, and what atti-tude did we take to the left’s approach to party-building and the role of the Fourth International? Instead of serious-ly addressing these questions, we effectively only had Tick-tin’s nihilistic attitude that the left was outdated and only we were the essence of authentic Marxism. Thus we lacked a programme by which we could have a dialogue with the left. Instead our implicit aim became to counterpose our-selves to the rest of the left, or the rejection of a policy for


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the reconstruction and recomposition of the left. The crisis of the SWP shows that our policy was sectarian.

Thirdly, we need to resolve whether we are a party that by-passes the left, or one that engages with and is part of the left. We can either arrogantly claim that we are the only Marxists, or else attempt at a dialogue with the left on a principled basis. In order that we can be principled, we require a programme. So programmatic development should be our priority. We cannot provide answers in our initial elaboration of programme, but the process should be thorough and detailed so that it can give distinctive an-swers about the most outstanding and important questions of the present. On this basis we can strive to achieve prin-cipled regroupment on the left, or a regroupment that strengthens the genuine left and weakens the forces of the centre and right. Our aim should be to act as a pole of at-traction for the left, and the process of building a party will be closely related to this regroupment process.

Fourthly, we need to engage honestly with history about the party question. Ticktin assumed that the CMP could represent authentic Marxism, and that only Trotsky-ism is this expression of authentic Marxism. The problem with this characterisation was that he rejected the majority strands of Trotskyism as not being Trotskyist. In other words, only the CSG, and the CMP by extension, was Trot-skyist. This is a very sectarian Fourth International. The logic of his standpoint is that regroupment itself is unprin-cipled. The practical result of this approach was the nation-alist rejection of the necessity to build an international par-ty. This was because the various forces of international Trotskyism were based on what was considered to be an opportunist conception of the class character of the USSR. Reliance on these narrow criteria of what was principled and what was opportunist meant that Ticktin rejected any conception of regroupment, and as a result the entire left was written off as being unable to represent revolutionary politics. Instead of this justification of a sectarian approach we need to establish which organisations sustain interna-tionalism, the struggle for communism, and independent proletarian politics. In the process of establishing these conditions we would also be developing our own pro-gramme and perspectives as to what constitutes principled politics. We would be learning in the process of regroup-ment, rather than engaging in self-proclamation about our own credentials to be the only principled Marxists.

Flexible and Detailed Criteria

In other words, the re-emergence of a CMP-type organisa-tion requires flexible and detailed criteria as to what organ-isations can be defined as principled. The possibility to develop such an assessment means we need to have a ru-dimentary knowledge of the history of Trotskyism, and on this basis we can establish with what organisations we can have a principled relationship. However, we need to ask ourselves whether we define ourselves exclusively as Trot-skyist, or is it possible also to establish relations with or-ganisations of Left Communism, such as Bordigist and Lux-emburgist groups. If the latter, the call for a new Interna-tional is not about one more regroupment of Trotskyism, and is instead about the reorganisation of the whole spec-trum of Left Communism. This would mean that the new CMP-type grouping would be trying to overcome the divi-sions within the forces of authentic Marxism. The only

forces that would be excluded from this process would be Stalinists and Social Democrats.

The potential result of this process is the formation of an international Marxist party, and this could represent a united left that has been absent since the period of the de-generation of the Comintern. So the controversy about the class character of the USSR does not have to be an obstacle to this process of unification. Instead, commitment to the international class struggle will represent the basis for unity and the development of a common programme. Further-more, the different party histories of the various organisa-tions no longer constitute an additional problem in relation to the process of unification. Instead, we can acknowledge that the differences are transcended by the perspective that communism is the only progressive alternative to the limi-tations of capitalism. Anti-capitalism, and support for an historic alternative, could unite what have been the authen-tic forces of Marxism. The authentic character of these forces is expressed by a common history of opposition to capitalism, Social Democracy and Stalinism. Understanding world capitalism in order to oppose its domination could become a task of the new united organisation. However, to arrive at this development requires the approach of re-groupment, and this perspective was lacking from the old CMP. In the last analysis, this limitation was an important reason for the demise of the CMP. We need to learn from these errors if a new CMP is to be established, an organisa-tion that can promote the cause of the unity of communists and the formation of an international revolutionary party. The demise of the old CMP represented a measure of panic and liquidation of the forces for a revolutionary organisa-tion. But we can utilise the lessons of this experience and renew the struggle to develop an international party.

Steve Freeman

Three Trends and a Funeral

The Rise and Fall of Neo-Stalinism in the CMP

HE Campaign for a Marxist Party was closed down at the December 2008 AGM. Many issues were thrown up

during the two years of its existence. But the fundamental question was always the Marxist party itself and its rela-tions with the working class. What trends can be identi-fied? Marxism must examine the campaign on the basis of struggle between trends. My starting point is the statement about closure from the Committee.

The CMP Committee gives four reasons for closure. First, the CMP failed as a catalyst for a Marxist Party:

The launch of the Campaign for Marxist Party was based on the belief that its founding would act as a means by which organised and unorganised mem-bers of the left could meet together to discuss ways in which they could cooperate to establish a Marxist political party. It could not itself be a political party, but was essentially a catalyst for that purpose.

T


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At the very least closure seems a case of bad timing. We have entered the greatest crisis of global capitalism any of us has seen. Stephen King (Chief Economist HSBC, Inde-pendent, 2 March 2009) says: ‘as capitalism stares into the abyss, was Marx right all along?’ Even somebody committed to capitalism recognises a big shock to the system can rea-waken interest in Marx’s ideas. Never has the time been more ripe for a new communist party.

The second reason given by the Committee was differ-ences and in-fighting. They say:

… in fact, differences on the road to that goal [of a Marxist party] and differences in the understanding of Marxism have proved fatal to that project. A larg-er organisation might have taken those differences in its stride, but, in the circumstances, that has not happened. Differences have become bitter and en-trenched. Since the left has been held back in part by apolitical infighting, and one of the aims of the CMP had been to overcome this problem, it is clear that the CMP has failed in its initial intentions.

This sounds pretty damning. But the Committee produced no statement about the substance of these ‘differences’. They failed to identify which were ‘bitter and entrenched’. Without facts we cannot tell if these are minor frictions on irrelevant questions or major issues of principle.

The Committee’s third reason was the failure to pro-duce a draft Manifesto. They say ‘members of the Commit-tee have not been able to produce an agreed Manifesto in large part because there is disagreement on the role of Sta-linism, the attitude to Trotsky and the approach to Trotsky-ist groups. This disagreement… remains a source of division at the present time, preventing the production of a Mani-festo.’ Again these issues are only identified in general terms. The answer is democratic debate of the issues, not closure.

Finally the Committee’s fourth reason concerned Marx-ist unity. They say ‘an attempt to continue the present form of the campaign would be damaging to the broader objec-tive of the unity of Marxists on a principled basis’. No evi-dence was produced for this claim. Indeed the opposite could be true. Marxist unity could be damaged if closure is seen as a breach of trust or an act of bad faith.

Dialectics of New Communism

The Committee failed to make a Marxist case for closure. Marxism is not about inventing excuses. It requires a con-crete analysis of the dialectics of the campaign. The CMP involved a struggle between trends and tendencies. We will not make sense of closure unless we understand this. In the context of struggle, closure was not an event in itself but a tactic or weapon deployed by one side against the others.

This struggle did not begin with the CMP. It reflects the struggle in the wider British Marxist movement, itself shaped by the Russian revolution and the long fight be-tween Stalinism and Trotskyism. Out of this a synthesis will emerge which I will call ‘new communism’. Marxism has to analyse this struggle and identify the green shoots of new communism.

The CMP was launched in 2006. Soon after, a struggle broke out between the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Democratic Socialist Alliance. Arguments ranged over debating styles, drinking alcohol at Committee meet-

ings, a code of conduct and the composition of the national Committee. By the 2007 AGM the DSA was in retreat and the Committee was taken over by the alliance of the CPGB, with Hillel Ticktin and allies.

At the 2007 conference ideological questions about the party began to come to the fore. This was a healthy devel-opment. The term ‘trend’ is used for a loose gathering or association of ideas. If this becomes more formalised and organised it will be referred to as a tendency. At the time three trends could be identified. I will call them Trend One, Two and Three. After the conference Trend Two held a meet-ing and became a tendency — the ‘Trotskyist Tendency’.

The Party Question

Two questions arose — the Marxist Party and the workers’ party. I use the term ‘workers’ party’ to describe a class-based party connected with a section of the trade unions seeking to advance the interests of the working class and its organisations. It was accepted as legitimate to debate the former. But when the workers’ party was raised by Phil Sharpe this proved divisive. The CPGB considered a work-ers’ party was a ‘halfway house’ and a betrayal of the Marx-ist party.

Like Phil, I supported the workers’ party slogan. It was a tactic which would or could put communists at the fore-front of the broader movement of the class. Communist opposition to this slogan relied on sectarian posturing against ‘compromises’, which Lenin attacked in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

I did not raise the workers’ party slogan or press the case because the agreed aim of the campaign was to pro-mote a Marxist Party. It would have been destructive to make a secondary and tactical question a focal point of dispute. Subsequently Mike Macnair claimed one reason for closure of the CMP was because of ‘endless debate about whether to found a Marxist party… or a halfway house’ (Weekly Worker, 11 December 2008). There was no ‘endless’ debate.

In the CMP I tried to adopt a ‘self-denying ordinance’, banning myself from speaking about it. The central ques-tion was the Marxist party and nothing should get in the way of that. This did not prevent the CPGB from raising it as political baiting. The Weekly Worker report of the clo-sure meeting was not untypical in describing me as ‘Steve Freeman — another halfway house advocate’ (Weekly Worker, 11 December 2008). The CPGB endlessly sought any opportunity for a sideswipe at ‘halfway houses’.

Now the workers’ party can be examined in the cold light of day, free from any allegation of undermining the CMP. When the original CPGB was formed in 1920 its rela-tionship with the Labour Party was one of the central ques-tions. The Marxist party and the workers’ party are inter-connected like a jigsaw in which one piece fits with anoth-er. The CMP only looked at one half of the puzzle.

Trend One

The Stalinist view of socialism in one country is consistent with the idea of a national Marxist party. In The British Road to Socialism the (former) CPGB sought to build an alliance with the Labour Party. It says ‘the Communist Par-ty is a Marxist Party… and political parties — the Labour Party and the Communist Party — have been established to advance the interests of the working class’ (The British Road


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to Socialism, 1968 edition, p 18). The Labour Party was seen as a working-class party with

a bourgeois reformist leadership. Today this approach is taken today by the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star). Trend One followed this duality of Marxist party and Labour Party. If Labour is a workers’ party, albeit bourgeois, then the call for a new workers’ party makes no sense. Worse, it will undermine Labour’s support in the trade unions.

Therefore the attack on the call for a new workers’ party is in reality a support for the existing Labour Party. At first this condemnation of the workers’ party as a ‘halfway house’ appears to come from the left. But in substance this is a ‘left’ defence of New Labour against its enemies in the trade union and socialist movement. From the right, ‘No halfway houses’ has been the politics of the Morning Star (CPB) for 20 years.

I have called this trend of thought in the CMP ‘neo-Stalinism’. It is not old Stalinism defending the USSR. But it borrows the old line backing the ‘British Marxist Party–Labour Party’ and dresses it up as something new. Some of my comrades have criticised this. They say this term is too emo-tionally loaded, open to misrepresentation and will give gratu-itous offence to the CPGB. They have a valid point.

The neo-Stalinist trend is not a reference to the CPGB but to a trend of thought in the CMP. Despite any possible misunderstandings of the term it expresses a certain truth about this set of ideas. I consider those supporting this trend as comrades, and some are friends I have known for many years. But we cannot avoid the truth for fear of giving offence or upsetting friends.

Neo-Stalinism is not about being rude or finding new ‘Marxist’ insults. I am merely alleging that this trend advo-cates a set of ideas on the party question whose roots are in British Stalinism. The aim is to be truthful and critical. The key demand is that these comrades break with neo-Stalinism. Persisting with these ideas was disastrous for the CMP. It weakens the political consciousness of the working class, and gives aid and comfort to New Labour.

Trotskyist Tendency

Orthodox Trotskyism stood for an International Bolshevik-Leninist party. Trotsky understood the party as fundamen-tally an international party. The Fourth International was built on that basis with a programme derived from the the-ory of permanent revolution. In Britain, Trotskyism has had a range of views on the Labour Party, including ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’ and ‘Vote Labour with no illusions’.

The rise of New Labour has changed this. Some Trot-skyists still see Labour as a (bourgeois) workers’ party. Oth-ers such as the Socialist Party see Labour as a bourgeois party and hence call for a new workers’ party. Trotskyism appears like the Roman god Janus facing two ways. The CMP Trotskyist Tendency reflected this. One side facing to the right was Gerry Downing defending Labour as a work-ers’ party. On the other facing to the left was Phil Sharpe arguing for a new workers’ party.

Trend Three

Trend Three called for an ‘international revolutionary dem-ocratic communist party’. Since the aim was world com-munism, the party should be identified as communist, not Marxist. The working class is an international and revolu-

tionary democratic class. This sets parameters on the na-ture of the communist party as the means by which the working class becomes a world political class.

Trend Three did not formally adopt any position on the new workers’ party. But there is a logic that recognises New Labour as a bourgeois party. The fight against New Labour demands the unity of socialists and communists in one republican socialist workers’ party. This is not an alterna-tive to an international communist party. On the contrary, communists must fight for both. Hence Marx and Engels supported the Chartist party and the Communist League.

A republican socialist workers’ party is a ‘halfway house’ on the road from Labourism to communism. I am not of-fended by a term that expresses the truth. If the working-class movement goes in this direction it is moving towards communism and into more fertile territory for com-munism. But ‘neo-Stalinism’ is not merely describing some-thing as a ‘halfway house’. It says ‘No to halfway houses’. This is a declaration of war or an attack by a definite trend, which is objectively (that is, regardless of subjective inten-tions) defending New Labour against the threat of a new workers’ party.

The CPGB

I do not call the CPGB ‘neo-Stalinist’. This term is restricted to Trend One in the CMP. The latter was obviously influ-enced by the CPGB. But a critical analysis of the CPGB would be more complex and contradictory than simply its view on the party question. Their role in the CMP should therefore be examined separately.

Some comrades see the role of the CPGB in the CMP as opportunist-sectarian. In this view they were never really interested in building the campaign. They only wanted to build their periphery and win over Hillel Ticktin and mem-bers of Critique. There is an element of truth in this. Cer-tainly the alliance with Ticktin seemed to have a pivotal role in the CMP.

We should not be too cynical or hypocritical. All politi-cally active organisations and individuals seek allies and try to win friends and influence people. Since we want to change the world it is a natural attribute of politics. No doubt the CPGB wanted to gain influence and members from the campaign. There is nothing wrong with that as such. But was closure a result of losing influence or any prospect of recruits? Was it a crude cost-benefit analysis?

If so, it is by no means the full story. The CPGB was fighting for its view of how to change the world and its view of the party. If its leaders had a cynical attitude to the CMP it should not be reciprocated. This would offer no way for-ward and lead to apolitical demoralisation. We have to concentrate on the political and ideological struggle. We have to identify the neo-Stalinist trend as a set of ideas which doomed the CMP and which must be destroyed.

The founding statement of the CMP was called the Six-teen Principles. It is now clear these have to be critically examined to find the roots of neo-Stalinism. If such a trend could exist in the CMP the founding statement made it possible. Any analysis of the failure of the CMP has to be traced back there. This is beyond the scope of this article.

The Draft Manifesto

In 2008, as the political fault lines were beginning to be clarified, it was decided there would be a Manifesto. The


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task of drafting it was in the hands of the CMP Committee, more or less Trend One. The significance of this in the de-mise of the CMP should not be underestimated. The Mani-festo would transform Trend One. It would represent the birth of an organised tendency and its hegemony over the campaign.

An agreed draft would be presented to the 2008 AGM. Debate, amendment and publication would have led to a new phase of campaigning. It was hoped to give the CMP appeal to a wider audience. Then closure would not even have been contemplated. Hence the failure to produce an agreed draft was a catastrophic failure. It proved fatal. Without the Manifesto the Committee no longer had the will to face of the anticipated criticism of the Trotskyists and Trend Three.

The Committee itself located the failure to agree a draft in ‘disagreement on the role of Stalinism, the attitude to Trotsky and the approach to Trotskyist groups’. (Commit-tee reason 2). This doesn’t tell us much but it doesn’t con-tradict my argument. The neo-Stalinist trend was unable to transform itself into a full-blown tendency. It was aborted. When push came to shove, ‘differences in the understand-ing of Marxism have proved fatal to that project’ (Commit-tee reason 3)

The Weekly Worker (11 December 2008) reported that comrade Mather (Critique) ‘firmly denied that the proposal to dissolve the CMP had anything to do with disagreement in the Manifesto drafting Committee. Comrade Bridge (CPGB) confirmed this.’ This denial contradicts the Com-mittee’s own statement and the logic of the situation. The firmness of the denial indicates the sensitivity of Commit-tee members and the centrality of this matter in the clo-sure.

Closure or Split?

The differences over the draft Manifesto would have be-come clearer when debated at the AGM. It would have fully exposed and widened the gap behind the draft Manifesto. Closure was therefore an imperative. It needed to be the first item of the AGM. By this tactic the CPGB and Hillel Ticktin were ‘reunited’ around a call for closure and the prospect of a new initiative in the future.

However ‘closure to avoid a split’ was complemented by ‘closure as a means of split’. At the AGM Mike Macnair re-vealed that the Committee intended closure as a means of breaking away from those with ‘elementary differences’ over: (i) ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘code of conduct’, and (ii) because of ‘endless debate about whether to found a Marxist party or a halfway house’, and (iii) ‘the inability of a minority to work constructively with the CPGB’. He ex-plained ‘it was necessary to split’ (Weekly Worker, 11 De-cember 2008). Closure was thus a tactic in a struggle be-tween trends.

The CMP had announced itself as an organisation with democratic best practice. The manner of its closure shows that this was not the case. The democratic process is not simply about majority decisions. The AGM is the sovereign body enabling members to call the Committee to account and to examine fully the problems and propose solutions. Closure halted that process in its tracks. Hillel Ticktin, alt-hough elected at the previous AGM, did not even attend.

The CMP was closed and therefore failed. This cannot

be denied. Was it closed because it failed? This is not prov-en. There were alternative Manifestos put by myself and Phil Sharpe. Certainly my proposal did not require the CMP to support Trend Three. In that sense it was not ‘sectarian’ and could have enabled us to avoid closure. However, CMP closure prevented its being discussed.

In the longer run the campaign would not have suc-ceeded without overcoming neo-Stalinism and Trotskyism. So was the CMP a waste of time? This largely depends on what lessons are learnt and conclusions drawn. The CMP was founded on an incorrect basis, confirmed by the failure over the draft Manifesto. But it was the site of struggle. Neo-Stalinism failed. Trotskyism formed a new tendency and then in time-honoured fashion split. All eyes are now on whether Trend Three can arise from the ashes of the CMP and begin giving birth to a new communism.

Bridget St Ruth

Crawling From the Wreckage: All Over Again

E see repeatedly in the most recent decade the pat-tern in which a group of comrades attempt to make a

new revolutionary start, to put behind them all the ‘old crap’ — the sectarianism, the narrow and inflexible anal-yses, the past feuds and genuine differences. This time it will be different, we hear, and usually we even want it to be true. This time we will debate openly and honestly, we will get to the root, as a direct consequence we will not fail to imbed ourselves in the knowledge and wisdom of the work-ing class. We will respect differences; we will not allow a bureaucracy to emerge in our new organisation.

It is clear now that such initiatives cannot succeed. Tragedy has been replayed as farce enough. When the law of diminishing returns is enacted by Brian Rix, the conse-quence is diminished responsibility. Disregarding for a little the question of the nature of the times, the problem is at least as much ecological as political. The numbers and en-ergies of those who do not share their honest motivations exceed those of the comrades who want to make a new start. Thus we see in recent years Respect, Open Polemic, Socialist Unity, Campaign for a Marxist Party, etc, each in turn as swiftly devoured as missionary lambs walking into a wolf enclosure bearing their own mint sauce and cutlery. (The Socialist Labour Party was a slightly different case in its shape — but essentially the same story where Stalinism inside the SLP did most of the dismantling before the new party was able to exploit its initial impact.) The smaller beasts have larger beasts, at their throats to bite ‘em, and so ad infinitum. Such projects are inevitably doomed because those who intend them harm outnumber them and out-resource them. The self-styled ‘Left’, through this process, comes to consist almost entirely of organisations which are enemies of debate and regroupment. (And let nobody as-sume we equate the two virtues.)

And at international level there are groupuscular ‘inter-nationals’ eternally vigilant for opportunities to recruit and promote a new national ‘section’, or even, for the ambi-tious, a new European Secretariat. Avoid them like poison. They will turn up on your doorstep and talk until late in the

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night, taking you seriously, considering your points. And again the next night, and the night after. They will take copies of all your literature, and in exchange bestow upon you bin-bags of theirs. They might offer to fly you to their next international conference, and you might be astonished at the level of political agreement they claim with you in their announcements. (Incidentally, don’t expect to enjoy attendance at these conferences — they will last from early morning till late night, with additional ‘emergency sessions’ if the risk arises that you might get out of the conference hall and talk to some sane local people. You will be dis-couraged from having a drink in the few hours outside ses-sions, and just don’t even think about finding a temporary sex partner.)

It is not just carnivorous organisations that fall rav-enously on regroupment initiatives. There are also numer-ous individuals who turn up at almost every attempt to start anew (like the therapy vampires in Fight Club).

What categories of individual political pathology may we distinguish here? Here are some — you will probably know more.

Incessant Jabberers (IJs) — you’ve seen them. Disa-gree with them by a few microns and they rush away to the library, cranking out 40 or 50 sides of stodgy prose, obses-sively footnoted as if you have any interest at all in tracking their thought processes and knowing what they have read recently. They expect you to finance the reproduction and distribution of their material. And if you don’t respond in kind, you are denounced at great length in their next doc-ument (which will not be slow coming) as ‘superficial’, ‘unserious’, etc. On the internet such people used to be referred to as ‘trolls’, suspected always of initiating ar-guments the outcomes of which do not interest them. Don’t bother to ask them if they have attended their union branch meeting, tenants’ association or any cam-paign group — they are far too busy with much more im-portant matters.

Chronic Oppositionists (COs) — Cannon’s apt phrase. They don’t usually lie to your face. They make it clear when they ask to join your project that they have hon-est differences and will bring them forward ‘at the right time’. ‘The right time’ is never slow arriving — usually just as long as it takes for them to have acquired the names and addresses of all your contacts. The difference between an IJ and a CO is that the CO does not want you to agree with him/her, while the IJ does (but has no idea what to do if you do agree). The CO doesn’t want to win a ‘faction fight’ — s/he only wants it to go on as long as possible, and will do everything necessary to ensure that s/he is treated with the maximum of injustice and dishonesty (you can model their pathology with a few paragraphs of Freud or Goffman). The big payoff for the CO is to be able to publish The Documents of the Expelled Opposition. Nothing is un-reasonable in ensuring this expulsion takes place — expect fingers in the till, public disloyalty, unseemly personal con-duct, all the repertoire of the naughty child who was de-prived of the benefit of a good thick ear decades before.

Determined Differentiators (DDs). These people have a repertoire of ‘principled issues’ to bug you with. Suppose you are busy organising support for a victimised low-paid worker at your workplace or in your neighbour-hood. The DD will be there at every meeting, voting for everything you propose but never volunteering to do any

actual work. The DD is just waiting for the chance to bend your ear with some essential question such as the inde-pendence of Cornwall or abolition of the licensing laws. S/he has the skills of a telesales operative on tight commis-sion rates. After a meeting you might be having a quick drink with some of the people in the incipient campaign, thinking you have done quite well to get a few inexperi-enced people to agree to give out a leaflet. The DD pounces — s/he doesn’t care what you think about Cornwall. The argument is the thing for them. After a few minutes your potential campaign supporters finish up their drinks and go home — they recognise a nutter when they see one, and won’t risk their jobs on one once recognised. Nor let one spoil their drinking time.

Long-Term Feudist (LTFs). These are among the hard-est to deal with. They have scores to settle from way back, decades are not enough to heal the wounds, remembered with advantages, of some past St Crispin’s Day (real or im-agined). Whatever was the original cause, by the time you hear about it (and you certainly will if you let them any-where near your activity) it has become an overriding prin-ciple which irrevocably divides the workers forever. This syndrome can infect many of the best comrades and is re-sistant to all therapy. There are too many sad illustrations still walking around, many of them experienced and knowl-edgeable revolutionaries no longer able to tolerate the presence of former comrades after a split. Their vocabulary of vituperation quickly reveals itself — ‘Kautskyite’, ‘De Leonist’, ‘Menshevik’, ‘Girondin’, ‘Pabloite’. Your attempt at a new group or campaign represents to them nothing more than potential recruits to an imaginary army dedicated to rerunning the battles of the past. They contribute to the solution of the present problems of the working class rather less than do the members of Civil War re-enactment groups.

And the two problems often overlap, as the larger, older predator organisations prey upon the isolated, encouraging them in their disruptive activity, providing resources and tactical advice. The state has little need to implant listeners, watchers or provocateurs into such milieux. Although they might do it anyway, for training purposes, or to spot talent that can be manipulated against the class.

So might there be any positive proposal out of all this? I recall in Moscow during the early stages of the Yeltsin re-gime, Scandinavian businesses that were taking over the previously state-run hotels and retail outlets in Moscow and Leningrad would refuse to employ anybody who had worked in hotels or retail under state control on the grounds that they would have acquired ineradicable and unacceptable attitudes to the work. Something similar would be appropriate in the launching of a new campaign or group. No current or recent members of ‘left’ groups should be invited to take part. Don’t risk ‘open’ meetings — build your campaign group only by direct individual ap-proaches until you have assembled a functional organi-sation. There’s no guarantee that will protect your peo-ple from pandemic sectarianism, but it might be worth a shot. And as to regroupment — forget it. There’s nothing out there to regroup with that won’t be harmful to your objectives. Just a load of other comrades looking for a way out of the same impasse and obstructing your road to a solution.


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Theodor Bergmann

Germany Today The Role of Germany in the Global Crisis of

Capitalism

HE present world-wide crisis is not the first one and no surprise for Marxists. Karl Marx described the crisis of

1857. And the world has experienced similar ones since then. The cycles are not appearing in a precise rhythm, but their phenomena and effects reappear — with a difference in the economic and geographical dimension. Since 1945 Germany has experienced five such economic crises.

One of the deepest ever crises began on Black Friday, 24 October 1929, when the New York Stock Exchange (Wall Street) crashed, the soap bubble burst and shares lost sev-en-eights of their ‘value’. This deepened and aggravated the German economic crisis which had already started in 1926; the word was: ‘When New York is coughing, Germany has pneumonia.’ Large enterprises and banks crashed; small shopkeepers had to close. Mass unemployment sprang up in two years to more than six million (the total population then was 65 million). And most of the jobless had a family at home. The government cut salaries by more than 10 per cent. The capitalists did the same and even more — up to 15 per cent. The eight-hour day, a result of the November Revolution in 1918, was abolished and working hours ex-tended. The dole was cut — a lower payment for a shorter period; after a short while only one-sixth of the jobless re-ceived the full amount.

The two large workers’ parties were involved in an in-ternecine fight. The Social Democratic Party did not even want to fight against this joint offensive by the state and the capitalists; they ‘tolerated’ the bourgeois government ‘to avoid the greater evil’ of fascist dictatorship. The ADGB (the main trade union centre), dominated by the SPD, fol-lowed this line; it asked three economists (Wladimir Woytinski, Fritz Tarnow and Fritz Baade) to draft an alter-native economic plan, but avoided all mobilisation of the working class in favour of this plan. It remained an academ-ic exercise. The Communist Party of Germany isolated itself by its ultra-left rhetoric and its attempts to split the trade unions.

The de-classed elements of the middle and working class were seduced by the pseudo-socialist demagoguery of the ‘National Socialists’, who promised a national paradise for all Germans, once the Jewish capitalists have been liqui-dated. The German industrialists and bankers financed the fascist party (NSDAP); the army gave arms to its paramili-tary terror forces, the SA and SS. Military exercises were conducted on the large estates of the big landlords. The upper level of the state bureaucracy was sympathetic to the fascists, as were the courts and the police. Professors creat-ed the justifying ‘theories’: that is, Germany a nation with-

out space, justifying the imperialist plans to conquer the ‘East’, the Ukrainian granary, and to reconquer ‘our colo-nies’. The imperialist plans of 1914 were revived; only the preparations for the Second World War were more inten-sive and more concentrated.

The bitter poverty, the hunger, the hopelessness, the inactivity of the labour movement prepared the soil for the fascist propaganda; and thousands of the hopeless were recruited by the SA, which offered them food, a uniform, a home in a barracks and a weapon to be used against all socialists, all Jews, all opponents. The bourgeois parties faded away, bourgeois democracy was hollowed out, and the capitalist class transferred state power in a ‘legal form’ to the fascists on 30 January 1933. The rest is well known: terror, rearmament, war. The beginning of the arms race in the industrialised world prepared the economic ‘recovery’, and the massive destruction of the war opened the path to a new phase of investment and reconstruction.

The 60 years since 1945 saw five smaller economic crises in Germany and Europe. The notion of cyclical capitalist crisis was not mentioned in the media, only minor ‘reces-sions’. The big bang came again from the leading and larg-est capitalist economy, the United States. And again the close international interaction has led to an avalanche in the whole capitalist world. Bankruptcies are spreading like an epidemic in the US and from there to Germany, from the ‘finance industry’ to the real economy. While the managers — whether ‘successful’ or not — can leave their job un-harmed and with a very generous pension, tens of thou-sands are dismissed with empty hands into extended un-employment.

At the peak of the past boom we still had more than five million registered jobless, in reality more than six million. Now the administration has corrected statistics so inten-sively that the figure in November 2008 came down to 2.95 million. The reality is about five million. The number of the working poor has risen dramatically.

In the last few years of the moderate boom, profits were rising, and managers and shareholders increased their ‘re-muneration’. Profits were so large that they started large-scale speculation, seeking out the highest profits for their idle capital — profit maximisation was and is the law of capitalism.

But this last boom was different from normal booms. Real wages and salaries declined, unemployment settled at a high level. In the capitalist offensive many achievements of a century of struggle were abolished. The number of workers with ‘tenure’ is declining rapidly: all sorts of pre-

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carious types of employment are increasing. Fewer and fewer employees are covered by social and health insur-ance. Unemployment is high, but unemployment statistics are constantly being ‘improved’. Wage agreements are not national any longer nor do they cover all those employed in a particular branch, since many enterprises leave their or-ganisations. Step by step we return to the labour market conditions of early capitalism, while the work process itself is intensified and workers are worn out long before pension age, which has now been raised from 65 to 67 for men. The managers aim at a remuneration equal to US levels, while the workers are to be pushed down to the level of Calcutta.

The managers have gained a lot from our modesty, and during the boom they experienced a trickle-up effect; they accumulated huge profits which called for maximum inter-est for this wandering capital — over-accumulation. The CEO of Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann asks for 25 per cent interest per year. This free capital of many billions initiates the spiral of rising profits, speculation, the ‘creation of new products’ — bubbles without any backing in real production.

Our trade unions are not in a good shape. While we still lived in the last ‘boom’, their wage demands were much too modest. Wage agreements were too soft with all types of ‘opt-out clauses’. The leader of the metalworkers’ union, Klaus Zwickel, offered an ‘alliance for employment, training and competitiveness’, which implied readiness for wage dumping against our peers in other countries — in spite of the fact that German industries are highly competitive. This approach was particularly strong after the SPD formed a government with the Greens in 1989. Gerhard Schröder (SPD), the elected chancellor, very soon showed his real intentions. With Agenda 2010 he organised the general attack on the established system of social security. Walter Riester, formerly a metalworker, now Minister of Social Affairs, began to dismantle and privatise the old-age pen-sion scheme and demanded that everyone should take out an additional private insurance. The second phase of the dole, for which we had paid during our employment, was abolished, and after 12 months the jobless are sent to the ‘welfare department’, where one receives the minimum of 345 Euros per month, but one is dependent on the goodwill of the officers.

This was called modernisation and reform, thus entirely changing the sense of reform, which now in fact implies planned deterioration of the living conditions of the work-ing class. The leadership of the SPD and the trade unions fulfilled the wishes and demands of the capitalists. The union leadership felt bound to support their ‘ruling’ com-rades. Already in the late 1920s the leftist writer Kurt Tu-cholsky said: ‘They believe they are in power; but they are only in government posts.’ One of the disastrous effects of this for the trade unions is a heavy exodus of members.

The leadership of the SPD has ‘developed’ from reform-ism (in the old sense) to modernisation management. From party and ministerial office they directly move into the management of large capitalist enterprises. Chancellor Schröder became an ‘employee’ of three international firms. Dr Wolfgang Clement (SPD) organised the destruction of the unemployment insurance scheme; he is now a boss in a large energy firm. Norbert Hansen, head of the railway un-ion Transnet, switched in one day over to the management of the German railways. Gerster, former minister in Mainz,

became the head of a ‘yellow’ union, financed by new pri-vate logistics firms. More such examples could be cited.

In the recent aggravated economic crisis strikes are more frequent than before, but naturally become more difficult. The slowdown of industrial production and the crisis in the ‘finance industry’ lead to more dismissals, compulsory vacations, etc. Therefore mass demonstrations, pressure from the ‘street’ on the government and an alter-native programme of action are called for. The union lead-ership, however, keep silent.

The mood is different among the union membership and the local officials who maintain contact with reality and feel the anger of their members. It is necessary to or-ganise a huge national demonstration like the one in 2004 with more than half a million participants. That one was organised from below! But the leaders succeeded after the demonstration in obstructing any follow-up.

Without strong pressure outside parliament the gov-ernment will solve the crisis the capitalist way: bailing out the bankrupt financial institutions and offering generous subsidies to the industrial enterprises, which avail them-selves of the opportunity to ask for the same. The Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück (SPD), offered 500 billion marks to the banks, twice the size of the state budget. This was voted through the Diet in two hours. Just a few weeks earli-er the government could not find the money to raise the dole for the long-term jobless from 345 Euros. The distribu-tion of the huge subsidies is supervised by the beneficiaries themselves and their lobbyists — a self-service store for the bankers and industrialists — not by the parliament. No conditions are stipulated. It is doubtful whether the heavy injection of state money will have a stabilising effect.

What are the actual demands of the working class? No dismissal of employees in banks and factories. Dismissal of the responsible managers without pension. Workers’ control of the banks. A large programme of public works at union wage rates. A general minimum of 10 Euros per hour (Germany is

one of the few EU countries without a minimum wage). Abolition of the Schröder ‘reform’ and return to the

previous system of social security. Ending of privatisation. No more co-management — workers’ control instead. Salary and wage rises, promotion of internal mass con-

sumption. Independence of the trade unions from the SPD and a

return to their traditional task of class struggle for the improvement of our living conditions.

Summing up, this is not the first economic crisis of capital-ism and no surprise for socialist observers. It will not be the last if the working class tolerates these irresponsible exploi-ters. Their governments tell us that at the next meeting of the 20 largest economies in the spring of 2009, they will determine measures which will ensure that such disasters cannot be repeated. That we have heard before. The Social Democrats were sure in the 1920s and assured the German workers that they had domesticated capitalism and that ‘we will peacefully grow into socialism’. At best this is a misunder-standing of the internal laws of capitalism. Today we have professors teaching ethics of economy to the managers.

Only if the working class supersedes capitalism and fights for a socialist society will we rid ourselves of this plague. Deep economic crises are immanent to the capital-


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ist system. The bourgeois democratic state is owned by the bourgeoisie; the entanglement of the capitalist class with the state administration is tighter than ever before.

The working class will have to pay for the huge subsi-dies given out to the capitalist enterprises in different ways;

we will be the losers. Some entrepreneurs will be swallowed by their larger competitors, but will not be joining the job-less. In this process economic power will concentrate even further and thus also political power. The working class has no alternative to organised struggle.

Arthur Trusscott

Rajani Palme Ratzinger Popes Old and New

COUPLE of years ago in this magazine, my colleague Cheney Longville presented an intriguing parallel be-

tween, on the one hand, the current Pope Benedict XVI (Josef Ratzinger) and his immediate predecessor Pope John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła) and, on the other, the leading British Stalinists Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt. He wrote:

There is a problem for the Vatican in that Ratzinger lacks the charisma of Wojtyła. He is to his predeces-sor what Rajani Palme Dutt was to Harry Pollitt, the dour, publicly humourless eminence gris of the Brit-ish Communist Party as against the apparently ami-able front man with the common touch. Whereas Dutt and Pollitt worked for most of the time in tan-dem, here the cold theoretician and apparatchik has taken the place of the long-standing genial public face of Roman Catholicism. Ratzinger’s opinions are no different to Wojtyła’s, but it is unlikely that this backroom schemer will pull in the crowds in the way that his charismatic predecessor was so adept at doing. (New Interventions, Volume 12, no 1, Spring 2005)

Events since then have not only confirmed this analysis, but have also demonstrated an even closer parallel between them.

Faced in 1956 with Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ that partially debunked the myth of the immaculate Stalin, and with the ensuing intellectual ferment within the Com-munist Party of Great Britain, Dutt held forth:

What are the essential themes of the Great Debate? Not about Stalin. That there should be spots on any sun would only startle an inveterate Mithras-worshipper. Not about the now-recognised abuses of the security organs in a period of heroic ordeal and achievement of the Soviet Union. To imagine that a great revolution can develop without a mil-lion cross-currents, hardships, injustices and excess-es would be a delusion fit only for ivory-tower dwellers in fairyland who have still to learn that the thorny path of human advance moves forward, not only through unexampled heroism, but also with ac-

companying baseness, with tears and blood. (Labour Monthly, May 1956)

This insensitive statement caused outrage within the party. Dutt replied in a manner that showed that he did not have the slightest ability to assuage doubts and concerns within the party, even if he had actually wished to. Referring to correspondence he had received, he excused his original contemptuous comments as ‘these very incidental remarks’ that were written in an ‘unfortunately worded’ attempt to correct the ‘imbalance’ in much of other people’s writings on the question. The emphasis that he put on the positive sides of Stalin seemed to his readers that he was ‘appearing to treat contemptuously the shock caused by the gravity of the revelations’.

Stuck in a hole, Dutt kept digging. He did his best to put Stalin in a good light, praising his ‘genius, unyielding courage, steadfastness and devotion to the revolution’ be-fore he went off the rails after 1934, and he did his best to put a positive gloss on Soviet society as it existed under Stalin. He concluded with the truly bizarre assertion that the fact that ‘many of these dear friends and comrades’ who disappeared in Stalin’s purges turned out after all not to be ‘traitors’ gave him the feeling not of ‘the end of the world’ or of the god that failed, but of ‘the sunrise breaking through the clouds and the dawn of a new day’ (Labour Monthly, June 1956).

Dutt’s reputation was never to recover from his risible defence of the indefensible. After then, he waged a spirited but futile rearguard battle against the forces of ‘revisionism’ in the party. He manfully defended the Soviet regime against the CPGB leadership’s condemnation of Moscow’s crushing of Dubček’s reforming regime in Prague in 1968, but the praise he received in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia was small compensation for his growing political obscurity at home.

To return to the present, it is clear that Ratzinger is aiming to turn the clock back, almost certainly aiming at the overturn of the more liberal ethos and measures intro-duced by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in the early 1960s. At the time a supporter of Vatican II, he subse-quently swung across to wage a reactionary counter-attack against it. Since his inauguration in 2005, he has managed to upset a whole range of people with his intemperate re-

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marks about Islam, his reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass with its anti-Jewish overtones, his advocacy of a defi-nition in the European Union constitution of the idea of Europe as a Christian entity, and his push for the canonisa-tion of the wartime Pope Pius XII, under whose leadership the Vatican enjoyed a congenial relationship with Mussoli-ni’s regime and Hitler’s Third Reich.

The latest proof of Ratzinger’s reactionary rampage is his decision to lift the excommunication of four bishops of the Society of St Pius X. This society was founded by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 as a conserva-tive opposition to liberalising trends. Lefebvre himself had a long history of backing the far right, from the collabora-tionist Vichy regime during the Second World War to the Front National of more recent times. Lefebvre’s followers had helped harbour the notorious Paul Touvier, who was central to the deportation of Lyon’s Jews during the war; indeed, this Nazi accomplice was found in Lefebvre’s priory in Nice. These four bishops were excommunicated during Wojtyła’s reign in 1988, not so much because of their con-servative views (one suspects that Wojtyła, along with Ratzinger then in his backroom position, would have been sympathetic to their worldview), but because Lefebvre or-dained them without the Vatican’s permission — a serious violation of organisational protocol. Indeed, the rescinding of the excommunication is a sign that the Vatican wants this conservative faction back in the fold.

What has caused widespread public outrage is that one of the bishops in question, Richard Williamson, is an out-spoken Holocaust denier who claims that the Nazi gas-chambers did not exist and that no more than 300 000 Jews died in wartime concentration camps. He also believes that there is a plan by the Jews to obtain world power, and that the US authorities were responsible for the attack upon the World Trade Center in September 2001; we clearly have a pretty serious conspiracy merchant here. To add a certain piquancy to the affair, in itself worthy of Dutt’s insensitive talk of Mithras-worshippers, Ratzinger’s decision was an-nounced within a mere three days of 2009’s Holocaust Re-membrance Day. There are those who say that it is not fair to rake up Ratzinger’s wartime experience in the Hitler-Jugend, but this latest episode cannot but help bring to one’s mind the words of one of our regular readers: ‘You can take this Pope out of the Hitler Youth, but you can’t take the Hitler Youth out of this Pope.’

Confronted with an international outburst of anger, Ratzinger, again in a remarkable parallel of Dutt’s conduct in 1956, started to backtrack and, whilst still welcoming the bish-ops back into the fold, demanded that Williamson retract his Holocaust-denying statements (it isn’t clear whether he has been asked to retract his ideas about the world Jewish conspir-acy). But, as with Dutt, the damage has been done. Ratzinger and the Vatican bureaucracy have exposed themselves as being willing to rehabilitate a thoroughly reactionary group of clergy, one of whom has openly expressed opinions considered by most people as repellent. It is not, of course, that Ratzinger objects to the general ethos of the Society of St Pius X. Indeed, his lifting of the excommunication leads one to consider that he sees Williamson’s Holocaust denial as an aberration, a dirty speck on an otherwise pristine body, rather than what it actu-ally is: a particularly putrid abscess upon an already malodor-ous limb.

The question arises as to whether Ratzinger’s relentless illiberal orientation will give sustenance to Roman Catholi-cism in this increasingly secular and sceptical world; or will it in the end be self-defeating? Organised religion is in a difficult position. If it liberalises a little too far — and Ratzinger & Co know this only too well — a religious cur-rent can end up like the Church of England, almost defin-ing itself out of existence as a coherent religious institution. On the other hand, if it tightens up the ideology, a church will repel its more liberal members, and will be in danger of becoming an ossified, reactionary sect; maybe a big and possibly influential one, but a sect nonetheless.

It is highly doubtful that Roman Catholicism would come to grief even if it were to liberalise itself a little and amend some of its dogmas, such as the use of contraception within a marriage. Indeed, it may eventually need to do so. The whole apparatus of the church from the lowly parish priest to the Pope himself must know that this stricture is quietly ignored by large numbers of people who nonethe-less consider themselves good Catholics; just consider the low birth-rate in Italy. The Catholic church has survived the centuries at least partially because its leadership has known how to adapt to social change, adopting a more liberal tack if necessary. Indeed, unlike many hard-line reli-gious currents, Roman Catholicism accepts the theory of evolution. And Ratzinger was savvy enough to call on Williamson to recant his Holocaust-denying views. However, liberalising reforms were ruled out under Wojtyła, and will not be happily considered whilst Ratzinger remains Pope.

Ratzinger has been and will continue to be considerably more successful in getting his way than poor old Dutt, whose star was on the wane even before the events of 1956 pushed him on the way to obscurity. After all, irrespective of his official title as Christ’s representative on Earth, Ratzinger is the ganzer macher, the boss man, whilst Dutt even at his most influential merely ran a branch office, in-terpreting, albeit in an undoubtedly erudite manner, the line handed down ex cathedra from Moscow. And, unlike Stalinism, Roman Catholicism is not dependent upon a national state, and one with a limited lifespan at that.

Perhaps in the longer term, the parallel will eventually reassert itself. One can legitimately enquire whether the illiberal direction in which the Vatican is heading might alienate many liberally-minded Catholics, who are almost certainly a lot more in number than the conservative Catholics who prefer a bit of fire and brimstone and would rebel against any liberalisation? Could Ratzinger’s gamble on appealing to the latter, even at the cost of alienating the former, ultimately leave him, like Dutt, stranded by social forces beyond his control? This cannot be completely ruled out. Nevertheless, as it is, Ratzinger’s war against the liber-alisation represented by Vatican II is bound to continue. Ratzinger took over the reins of command at the age of 78, the very age at which Dutt expired. By the time of his death, Dutt was a largely marginalised and forgotten figure, his once considerable influence having withered away. Ratzinger, on the other hand, seems to be in his prime; whatever the long-term prospects for his church, for the time being he is determined to reshape Roman Catholicism in his own image.


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Mike Jones

Spies Versus Mafiosi in Kosovo

N a front-page article on 25 November 2008, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich-based daily, reported

that on 14 November, a BND (Federal Intelligence Service) agent had apparently been caught throwing a bomb over the wall encircling the headquarters building of the inter-national administration in Kosovo’s main town Priština. The Kosovo government claimed to possess a video-tape of the attack. Two other BND agents, who with the accused were operating under the cover of a security consultancy entitled Logistics Coordination Assessment Service, were also arrested. Further evidence was supposedly found in the house where the three agents lived.

Why the BND would mount such an operation is a mys-tery and it appears to be a fabrication. One theory is that perhaps the mainly UÇK (KLA) people behind the arrests want publically to humiliate the BND. In 2005, a BND re-port described Hashim Thaçi, the Kosovo Prime Minister, and other previous commanders of the UÇK, as key figures of organised crime in Kosovo. Thaçi was also said to be behind numerous murders by professional hit-men.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 26 November 2008 also raises the possibility that the BND report, dated 22 February 2005 and leaked towards the end of that year, could be behind the arrests. It saw the political leadership in Kosovo as those behind organised crime in the region, and stated that:

There exists the closest interaction between politics, business and internationally operating crime struc-tures in Kosovo. The criminal networks behind it promote instability. They have no interest in the creation of a functioning state structure.

On page 2 of the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 25 November, a team of journalists analyses the facts available. The agent accused of the attack claimed that he went to the scene of the crime four hours later in order to photograph it. He’d named his two associates as an alibi. BND sources say that the three are not cowboys but experienced agents who had gathered intelligence for the protection of German troops and lately on behalf of Eulex. Eulex is an EU creation that should involve some 2000 jurists, police and other officials, in order to try and build a functioning legal system in Ko-sovo. Why should the German government want to bomb the headquarters of an international organisation in a country that it has promoted both politically and financial-ly like no other, it asks. Germany had, of course, taken the lead in the destruction of Yugoslavia as a whole.

The analysis quotes another report on Kosovo by the In-stitute for European Policy in Berlin, on behalf of the Bun-deswehr (army), from the Swiss organ Weltwoche: ‘Drug, human and weapon smuggling is the only growing business [in Kosovo]. Judges and state prosecutors were intimidated

or bribed.’ The Kosovo government claim that the senior of the three agents was involved in the murder of Ekrem Rex-ha, previously a UÇK commander, who had wanted to speak out about criminal activities carried out by the UÇK during the Kosovo war. In March 2003, another ex-UÇK associate was sentenced to 10 years in gaol for in-stigating the crime. The analysis states that the British have delivered a report of the same type but worded it more diplomatically. It concludes that the Kosovo gov-ernment is nervous over Eulex and doesn’t want it ever to get to work.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung of 27 November (p 3) has a further analysis by the same team plus one, which looks at the facts of the case that had by then emerged. The BND agent accused of the bombing also had papers in his bag concerning Hashim Thaçi and Ramush Haradinaj. He wrote about the latter years ago: an ex-UÇK commander, he is one of the biggest gangsters in Kosovo. Injured in a shoot-out with a rival gangster clan he was rushed to the huge US base Camp Bondsteel, from there he was flown to a US mili-tary hospital near Kaiserslautern. While Prime Minister of Kosovo he was transported to the Hague Tribunal on war crimes charges. He was freed but according to the analysis it was clear that many prosecution witnesses were too scared to speak out. Thaçi, it points out, was the protégé of the then US Foreign Minister and architect of the US plan to destroy Yugoslavia, Madeleine Albright, and was then promoted by the US and Britain (Robin Cook was promi-nent in promoting the UÇK). It also points out — some-thing we said at the time — that the Kosovar Albanian groups that fought the Serbian authorities were financed by drug and human trafficking; that the UÇK profited from the chaos in neighbouring Albania, and that, according to In-terpol, Albanian drug barons in the whole of Europe fi-nanced the Kosovar terrorists. The error of the BND, the analysis says, was to not speak in the general but to name names like Haliti, Thaçi and Haradinaj as the ‘key players’, and while Thaçi is the darling of both the Kosovar Albani-ans and the US, the BND sees him as a ‘Godfather in the garb of a smooth politician’.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung of 29 and 30 November, in an article by the same team of journalists, describes the criti-cism of the government’s efforts on behalf of the three BND agents by both high-ranking BND figures and politicians of all parties: ‘The federal government has allowed itself to be led by the nose through world politics by a country in which organised crime is the form of government.’ Editorial comment in the same issue, headed ‘Abandoned Agents’, criticises the action of the government, as in Kosovo it is not a matter of secret diplomacy when German civil serv-ants are fitted up by Godfathers of organised crime, and instead one should shake the fist:

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Or do they secretly fear that the BND agents had been involved in a bombing? No chancellor has ever had complete trust in the foreign service and there have continually been outrages and a peculiar form of independent life.

It asks whether any suspicion of this type can be allowed in the case of the BND. If so then the service should be dis-solved. If not then real crisis management and plain speak-ing is necessary.

A mixture of government, business and organised crime is present today in Central Asian and Caucasian states that came out of the disintegrating Soviet Union. In Afghani-stan, the government propped up by imperialism is made up of drug-barons, warlords, arms smugglers and suchlike. In Iraq the British allowed various militias and criminal clans to take over in Basra. The EU has accused Bulgaria of being in the grip of organised crime. Owing to the lack of a functioning central state Bosnia is a regional centre of or-ganised crime. The US use of mafiosi to attain its aims is not new. New York mafia ‘Capo di tutti Capi’ Lucky Luci-ano, ‘arranged Mafia support and guidance for the Allies in Sicily — in return of course for various business conces-sions’, during the invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943:

Lucky was released from prison and flown back to his homeland to ‘facilitate the invasion’ — and on the side, to set up the Mafia’s new narcotics empire. Vito Genovese, well-known New York hoodlum wanted for murder and various crimes in America, turned up in uniform in Sicily as a liaison officer at-tached to the US Army… Don Calo Vizzini [a con-victed Mafioso] was put in control of the island’s

civil administration… (Alan Whicker, Whicker’s War, London, 2006, pp 67-58)

Whicker points out that suppressing the Mafia had been one of Mussolini’s rare achievements, but five million Sicili-ans had now been left to a future often controlled by the Mafia. It would also become entangled with elements of Christian Democracy.

In the run-up to the NATO bombing of the rump Yugo-slavia, while the UÇK was busy murdering Kosovars who worked for the authorities, it was cultivated by Western intelligence agencies, training took place and items of equipment were delivered. Heavy-handed, brutal and summary responses to UÇK murders played into the hands of the powers that wanted Milošević removed. Among oth-er reasons were Yugoslavia’s alliance with Russia and its rejection of NATO. The godfathers gained political power with the withdrawal of the Yugoslav Army.

Organised crime is now running a state in southern Eu-rope hoping to join the EU. Here in Britain MPs like Boris Johnson and Tam Dalyell spoke out about the nature of the UÇK when it became clear that it was becoming an ally. We also pointed out that it was a mafia-type outfit. They were denounced, as were we. Not only ex-left liberal-imperialism supporters but supposed Trotskyists were right behind the UÇK. John Palmer, one-time European editor of the Guard-ian, who one would assume had some knowledge of these matters, accused me of repeating ‘Četnik slurs’ about the Kosovar Albanians being led by mere criminals and bandits, in New Interventions, Volume 11, no 2 (Summer 2003).

It would be useful for British citizens to know the con-tents of the British report on Kosovo mentioned in the Süddeutsche Zeitung analysis.

Social-Democratic Concentration Camps in Wartime Sweden

LAST year a book appeared in Sweden entitled Swedish Concentration Camps in the Shadow of the Third Reich, written by his-torian Tobias Berglund and journalist Niclas Sennerteg, which exposed a piece of Swedish history hitherto secret and unknown to all but for a few people. During the Second World War, Sweden ran 14 concentration camps in which thousands of foreign anti-Nazis were incarcerated without trial, without any reason being given, and with no fixed sentence.

Sweden avoided being involved in the Second World War by having a ‘special relationship’ with Nazi Germany. German troops and military equipment was transported by train through Sweden, censorship prevented all but a few courageous souls from denouncing Nazi crimes, and the iron ore and ball bearings so vital to the Nazi war industry were delivered. Communists and left-wingers were repressed. One can argue whether this was collaboration or just accommodation. There were pro-Nazi elements in the ruling class.

Those who inhabited the 14 concentration camps were mainly Norwegian anti-Nazi resistance people, but hundreds of Danes who had fled to safety in Sweden were also interned. In 1943, when fortune was favouring the Allies, with the victories of the Red Army in the East, and the victory in the Western desert, the Swedish authorities released the anti-Nazis and in-terned the collaborators with the Nazis who had fled to Sweden.

An even bigger shock than finding out that Sweden had what Tobias Berglund describes as ‘a Guantánamo-type camp sys-tem’, was to find out that it was headed by Tage Erlander, Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden from 1945 to 1969. In his memoirs there is no mention of this key position he held during Second World War. Erlander became a father-figure during the postwar years, and was highly respected on the international stage. Another myth bites the dust! Mike Jones


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Chris Gray

Cricket, People’s Cricket

Cricket, lovely cricket! — At Lords, where I saw it.’ — Lord Beginner, 1950

ESPITE the boost that England’s victory over Australia to win the Ashes in 2005 must have given the English

game, English cricket’s problems will not have been magi-cally resolved by it. These problems are organisational ones, which stem from the history of the game in its country of origin. There is, of course, no way in which sport can be separated from the society in which it is engaged, and Eng-lish cricket is possibly the supreme example of this truth. Any one who doubts this should read three books which cover the history of the game, viz, Beyond a Boundary by CLR James, A Social History of Cricket by Derek Birley, and Anyone But England by Mike Marqusee. Between the three of them you get a good feel for the game’s rural origins in late mediæval times and for how it was taken up by the aristocracy in the eighteenth century CE, becoming an ad-junct of empire in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. These books also throw light on various factors which have cast a shadow on the game: I have in mind ‘shamateurism’ (exemplified above all by the towering figure of WG Grace), the ‘body-line’ tactics employed by England in 1932-33, the activities of one Kerry Packer, and, last but by no means least, apartheid in South Africa and its baleful effects on test cricket.

Shamateurism is, as I see it, the most serious of the his-toric blights on the game, because it arose out of and inten-sified the conditions making for all the others. Derek Birley shows brilliantly how England’s aristocrats took the game under their wing for a variety of reasons — not least the opportunities for betting that it offered. In the process payments began to be made to participants in cricket matches: this necessarily divided cricketers into two groups, payers (if they chose also to play) and payees. Hence the long-standing division into amateurs (‘gentle-men’) and professionals (‘players’); this division persisted in the English game at least until its official abolition in 1963. (Even after that, one could argue, its effects continued.)

The amateur–professional distinction was already well established when WG Grace appeared on the scene. Mike Marqusee has a wealth of detail on it. For example:

Dressing rooms were strictly segregated. There were separate entrances to the field (the grand entrance through the pavilion’s central gate was reserved for amateurs), separate travel, accommodation and din-ing arrangements, even separate tables and menus for meals taken during lunch intervals. These facili-ties were not only separate, but unequal in every re-spect. They symbolised the static hierarchy which the amateurs imposed on the democratic fluidity of cricket.

From the 1880s, county and Test captaincy be-came the preserve of amateurs, even when it meant appointing as captain the least experienced, least ef-fective player on the field. In cricket, mental labour, and with it the exercise of leadership, were made the prerogative of those who exercised leadership off the field. Amateurs were addressed by professionals as Sir or Mr at all times. Omitting this courtesy could result in a fine or dismissal. The amateurs, in turn, addressed the professionals by their surnames alone. Match reports and score cards denoted ama-teur status by placing the cricketer’s initials before the surname… [but] it had little to do with whether or not you made your living from cricket.

Indeed, for many decades, the distinction was ambiguous, and not of great concern to anyone, perhaps because it was considered self-evident in a society so sharply divided between the haves and the have nots. The Earl of Aboyne, for instance, ap-peared for the Players against the Gentlemen at Lord’s in 1819, for the simple reason that he had bet on them. A direct financial investment obviously made the Players ‘his’ side. But that did not stop him from becoming MCC President in 1821 or play-ing for the Gentlemen in 1827.

Defining and enforcing amateur status became a concern only in the 1860s and 1870s, when the élite were reasserting their authority against the profes-sionals. (Anyone But England, pp 92-93)

WG Grace exemplified the sheer irrationality of the whole distinction. As Mike Marqusee explains:

The Graces were a middle-class professional family seeking respectability through cricket and its associ-ation with the élite. But WG himself attended nei-ther public school nor university. He took 10 years to qualify as a doctor — long after he had achieved fame as a cricketer. Respectability demanded that a gentleman maintain an outside profession. But the expense of this profession was borne by WG’s pa-trons, who had to pay a locum to run his medical practice. (Anyone But England, p 94)

What institution was responsible for this state of affairs? The august MCC no less, which made him a member in 1869 in order to keep him out of the clutches of their pro-fessional rivals, the United South of England XI:

If they thought this would keep him from the enemy camp, they were sadly mistaken. Thereafter, whilst proudly displaying MCC colours (and collecting only whatever expenses were allowed), he cashed in on his fame. WG ‘organised’ matches for the United

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South for payment throughout the 1870s, and coin-cidentally played for them for expenses only, travel-ling all over Britain and Ireland to satisfy the vast public appetite to see him. MCC obviously knew what was going on, but considered the price — an extra layer of hypocrisy — well worth paying for this splendid new recruit to the amateur ranks. (A Social History of Cricket, p 105; for praise of WG despite all this see James, Beyond a Boundary, Chapter 4)

However, despite its being embedded in social relations which at times reeked of cant, cricket emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a game of ex-ceptional beauty, elegance, grace and skill with a power to entrance not only the inhabitants of these islands but many others across the globe. It exported itself successfully not only to Australia, whose triumph at the Oval in 1882 led to the famous death notice of English cricket, with the an-nouncement that the ashes thereof would be taken to the victors’ shores, but also to India — one of the interesting aspects of Birley’s book is its revelation that the three fa-mous pioneering Indian batsmen, Ranjitsinghi, Duleep-singhi and the Nawab of Pataudi, all played for England in test matches. The game also took hold in New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies, plus a number of other localities. During the nineteenth century, the USA showed some interest, but baseball proved more American and won out. American absence was more than made up for by the attacking flair of the Australians, however, and at interna-tional level the chief contest emerged as that between Eng-land and Australia.

It has to be said that the 1932-33 English tour of Austral-ia, marked by England’s use of ‘bodyline’ bowling, was a thoroughly shameful episode as far as the annals of English sides are concerned. Douglas Jardine was appointed Eng-land’s captain, and he proceeded to implement a plan for countering Bradman’s batting prowess by calling on his fast bowlers, Larwood and Voce, to bowl bouncers: the object was to aim not so much at the stumps as at the man — ‘a calculated breach of the existing conventions’ is how Birley puts it (A Social History of Cricket, p 235). As the batsmen wore no extra protection anywhere on the upper part of their bodies the tactic was also dangerous. No wonder the Australian captain Woodfull received England’s tour man-ager PF Warner very frostily when the latter called in at the Australian dressing room in the first test, declaring: ‘I don’t want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not.’ (A Social His-tory of Cricket, p 236) The Australian Board of Control complained direct to the MCC by cable: in reply MCC re-jected their allegations. Birley’s discussion of the tour, based partly on reminiscences by the contemporary Aus-tralian batsman Jack Fingleton, reveals that Jardine, who was born in India but educated at Winchester and Oxford, was a particularly arrogant imperialist who had no liking for Australians. He seems to have let them know it on a tour in 1928, and the Australian crowds barracked him, calling out ‘Where’s your butler to carry your bat?’, and, when he swatted flies, ‘Don’t kill ‘em, they’re the only friends you’ve got!’ Jardine’s comment on the barrackers was: ‘Here was Democracy arrogating to itself the right to demand in full a pound of flesh for which it had paid the princely sum of a shilling or two at the gate.’

Yet it was not just an example of imperialist arrogance. We have to ask: why did the body-line tactic emerge pre-cisely in the early 1930s? The answer is clear: the First World War dealt England a devastating blow, the British Empire was in crisis, on top of which there was a world crisis which brought some very ugly political movements in its train. CLR James got it right:

Body-line was not an incident, it was not an acci-dent, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket. The time was the early 1930s, the period in which the contemporary rejection of tradition, the contemporary disregard of means, the contempo-rary callousness, were taking shape. The totalitarian dictators cultivated brutality of set purpose. By now all of us have supped full with horrors… That big cricket survived the initial shock at all is a testimony to its inherent decency and the deep roots it had sunk. (Beyond a Boundary, p 186)

Cricket did survive, although the experience of 1932-33 cast a shadow — inter alia, James notes, it helped to confirm Don Bradman as a sort of ruthless run-making machine. But the actual theatrical spectacle created by the move-ments of 13 players in white flannels on a field of green turf remained unaltered — that is, until Kerry Packer came along around 1977. Packer wanted the exclusive television rights to test matches in Australia for his TV channel: the Australian Board of Control refused to grant this, so Packer proceeded to buy the services of international players to stage ‘World Series’ cricket, introducing such things as col-oured trainer suits, a white ball and play under floodlights. The plan eventually succeeded when in 1979 the ABC con-ceded Packer the exclusive rights he wanted.

Birley remarks:

In the immediate aftermath it became customary to blame World Series cricket for all the ills that were afflicting the first-class game. A longer perspective suggests that all it did was tear down the moth-eaten curtains of the old regime, letting in the glow-ing light of the modern world. (A Social History of Cricket, p 320)

Whilst conceding that there is much truth in that observa-tion, I cannot but feel that it ignores the full force of the aesthetic downgrade represented by Packer’s version of international cricket. Nor was the Packer package an im-provement in pure cricketing terms: you can dress up the players any way you like, within limits, but what appeals in the end is the quality of their play, what cricket aficionados refer to as style. And that style, it seems to me, is visually underlined better by the traditional garb, even allowing for helmets, and the ‘russet ball’ (to use Lewis Carroll’s expres-sion). Thankfully in the 2005 Ashes series we still got that, even if accompanied by such things as Betfair adverts on the field and umpires’ clothes bearing the message ‘Fly Emirates’.

What was much more damaging than Packer, however, was the poisonous effect of the South African apartheid regime on international matches in the latter half of the twentieth century. Not that it was absent before: Mike Marqusee has some exceptionally pertinent comments on


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the history of the South African game (see pages 205-17 of Anyone But England). And he has some perceptive insights into the links between the apartheid regime and the Eng-lish cricket establishment:

For many in English cricket, there was something right and just about the world of white South Africa, a world where people knew their places, where white skin brought comforts and privileges which only considerable wealth could purchase in Eng-land’s dog-eat-dog world. Here was a hierarchical, leisured society like the long-vanished England em-bodied in cricket’s traditions. No wonder that for them the defence of white South Africa merged so easily with a defence of ‘England’. No wonder they were unable to understand that by playing in South Africa they were rejecting the multiracial reality not only of South Africa but of contemporary Britain it-self. (Anyone But England, p 229)

This reactionary stance could not be sustained indefinitely. The refusal of the South African apartheid government to allow their cricketers to play against the ‘coloured’ English player Basil d’Oliveira was followed inevitably by anti-apartheid demonstrations against the South African touring side in England in 1970. The boycott weapon was effective in sport as to some extent also in the wider economic con-text, and South Africa was isolated on the international cricket circuit. But Kerry Packer had shown that players could be won over with monetary inducements (see Anyone But England, p 217). The result was the appearance of a number of cricketers in ‘rebel tours’ to South Africa from 1982 onwards; these players inevitably found themselves barred from representing their home countries, and several potential England regular players dropped out of the official side in consequence. Lord Chalfont, a prominent supporter of the apartheid regime, and who was also an MCC mem-ber, warned that English crowds would not support English teams which were not properly representative of the best home talent.

This proved not to be the case, but the whole concate-nation of events left a nasty taste behind it, and, for my part, my enthusiasm for the game, already damaged by the machinations of Mr Kerry Packer, reached rock bottom and I ceased to follow the fortunes of English international sides, official or otherwise. Fortunately, thanks to the ef-forts of India, Pakistan and the West Indies and the demise of the apartheid regime itself in 1989, the whole sorry saga

finally came to an end, although as late as 1997 it still could not be said that equal facilities existed for all races in post-apartheid South Africa (see Anyone But England, pp 234-37).

What of the future? It remains to be seen whether Eng-land’s cricket authorities can seize the chance available to extend provision for the game at grass-roots level, and whether the government will provide the necessary sup-port. Here, once again, Mike Marqusee has some useful observations:

The overriding need is to heal the Victorian rupture between first-class and all other cricket, both on and off the field.

But tinkering with competitive structures will not be nearly enough. Ticket prices for all games should be slashed — or done away with altogether. Cricket authorities worried about attendance at four-day county matches should grant free admis-sion to the unemployed or underemployed. More important, the counties have to become democra-cies, and ways have to be found to enfranchise all club cricketers and committed spectators. And the counties themselves have to become part of a uni-tary, representative structure which elects — and removes when necessary — all the game’s leading officials. At last cricket would have its parliament and at its disposal would be the resources of the English game. The county grounds and Lord’s would be nationalised — with no compensation for the MCC or others who have appropriated community property for so long. …

English cricket, like English society, can be re-newed only by more democracy — but in today’s world that means less market. The dictatorship of the marketing men and the sponsors has to be chal-lenged and overthrown — but not to be replaced by the old amateurs. English cricket, like the British economy, has to be reconstructed from the bottom. (Anyone But England, p 155)

In my view that, broadly, is what is needed, only with the proviso that, as soon as the resistance of the old regime has been broken, first-class grounds should not be left in state hands but handed over to the democratically-run counties. Then Middlesex can make use of Lord’s, and Essex can con-tinue with their practice — I assume they still do it — of staging county matches successively at a number of venues.

Paul Flewers

The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929-1941

An exciting new book by a New Interventions Editorial Board member

299 pages, £12.99 from Francis Boutle Publishers, 272 Alexandra Park Road, London N22 7BG website: www.francisboutle.co.uk

What they say: ‘extensively researched’ — Weekly Worker; ‘an extremely comprehensive survey’ — Permanent

Revolution; ‘a very enjoyable book’ — Jewish Socialist


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Mike Jones

Spooks and Scandinavia The Role of the Information Research Department

IN the Danish labour history journal Arbejderhistorie, no 2, 2008, there is an essay of interest to those in Britain who are concerned with the murky world of the spooks in general and in the Information Research Department in particu-lar. Entitled ‘The Information Research Department: In the Borderland Between Information and Intelligence During the Cold War’ (pp 33-50), the historian Iben Bjørnsson bases her study on materials found in the PRO in London, and refers to a couple of recent British books on the subject. In note 1 she refers to her own dissertation on the activity of the AIC, the anti-communist intelligence outfit set up by the Danish Social Democrats during the Cold War, and a study of the Norwegian Labour Party’s relationship with the IRD, The Relationship Between the British and Norwegian Labour Parties from 1945 to 1951 by AJG Insall, at Kings College London, which she hopes will be published, as it can illuminate in part relationships parallel to those she looks at in her own study here.

The English résumé of the study states:

From 1948 to 1977, the IRD under the Foreign Office was an integrated part of British Cold War policy. The IRD was in charge of propaganda, both overt and covert. Most of this propaganda was directed overseas in support of Britain’s foreign policy, and its scope was, largely, anti-communist. In order to make the most effective prop-aganda possible, the IRD also at times functioned as an intelligence department, collecting information about communists in other countries.

This article portrays the IRD work in Denmark as well as both British and Danish attitudes towards this kind of activity. Despite the limited political influence of the Danish Communist Party, the IRD had several opera-tions in Denmark, often as part of a broader Scandinavian scheme. The man who became identified with IRD work in Denmark and Scandinavia more than anyone else was Michael Cullis, a former intelligence worker who had switched to propaganda and information work. In Denmark Cullis built an impressive amount of contacts among those private organisations doing anti-communist work. Thus this person led to an array of anti-communist activities in Denmark, often in cooperation with local groups, but also with the American infor-mation services which were a close partner to the IRD in Denmark and in general.

Iceland was included in the IRD’s Scandinavian activities, as communism was then a serious force there, and the British tried to counter its influence by the training of trade union people together with the Norwegian trade unions and through university exchange schemes. The author relates how a well-known Danish author on a USIS-paid visit to the US with a stopover in Britain was also asked to spend some time in Iceland. Ostensibly there on behalf of the Danish section of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he held lectures, made contacts, and set up an Icelandic section of the CCF. The British saw his week in Iceland as a success.

Cullis collaborated with the CCF, the Social Democratic anti-communist intelligence outfit AIC, and the Atlantic Treaty Association, as well as cultivating trade unionists, writers, journalists and other opinion formers. Cullis took contacts to the rector of the newly-established Nordic Institute for Journalism at Århus university and suggested cer-tain lecturers whom would be useful to invite to give talks, as well as ensuring the supply of written materials and more open propaganda. A letter from the British ambassador in Copenhagen to the IRD in London stresses that neutralism was more dangerous than communism in Denmark, owing to military defeats in the nineteenth century in particular, so the IRD should work to discredit Soviet efforts to push Denmark out of NATO.

There is some humour in the study, such as IRD puzzlement over Danish journalists objecting to receiving already written articles for publication, and their failing to adopt the British outlook on EFTA (the non-EEC economic zone dominated by Britain), which was unpopular in Denmark, even after it had been fully explained to them. One com-plaint saw the Danes as ‘inflexible and considering the British as old-fashioned, uneducated and narrow-minded’. Lon-don replied that the Danes were not alone in seeing the British in that way, and it was necessary to dispel these mis-conceptions and present Britain ‘as a modern industrial power… a Britain which is “with it”, … not an easy matter when much of our tourist propaganda portrays Beefeaters and castles’.

What struck me was how IRD internal correspondence doesn’t talk in terms of lofty ideals but quite openly of con-vincing Johnny Foreigner of the correctness of British foreign policy interests. In those days the British claimed that they did not spy abroad and propaganda was done, as was spying, by the communists. This study is a useful addition to our understanding of that murky world.


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H Lavant

The Recent Construction Strikes Challenging the Bosses’ Anti-Union Agenda

HE strikes which erupted in the construction industry during the early part of this year were quite different

from any disputes that we have seen in this country for nearly 25 years. Not since the end of the great miners’ strike of 1984-85 have we seen independent action by a section of the trade union movement challenge the dominant logic of free-market capitalism. In some respects, this dispute, ra-ther like the miners’ strike, raised issues of an epoch-making type, because it had clear implications for the whole of the working class on a Continental, indeed global, scale. This dispute was of strategic significance.

The defeats inflicted by the ruling class have been in-ternational in scale and nearly three decades in duration. The emergence of a global market for capital has seen its corollary here in Europe with the European Union setting an increasingly anti-labour, pro-liberal agenda. The Conti-nentalisation of the engineering and construction industry is highlighted by the article ‘Construction in Crisis’ in the Spring issue of United, the journal of the Unite trade union:

French-owned Alstrom has been contracted by German power and gas utility company RWE to build a gas-fired power station near Newark that will produce enough electricity to power around two million homes.

1

Central to the way in which these companies are working within the Euro zone is the organisation of a multinational workforce. This workforce can be recruited in one country, but sent to work anywhere in Europe. Hired in one country, they are contracted at the same time to be paid at a certain rate of pay, which is often below that of the country to which they are moved in order to work. This creates a two-tier pay structure in spite of the fact that the jobs are com-parable. Just as pay rates are subjected to downward pres-sure, so everything else follows. The employers are in effect segregating by language, nationality, living and working areas, and even by religion, one worker from another.

They are fully backed up in this process by the force of European law, which makes it impossible for trades union in the actual workplace to insist on locally or nationally agreed arrangements. To take precedence, where such agreements are better than the arrangements agreed to by the workers in their original contract:

Employers have been empowered by EU Law, par-ticularly the European Court of Justice’s Laval and Viking ruling in 2007, which stated that workers’

1. United, Spring 2009.

terms and conditions need only meet the regula-tions of their country of origin, not those where they will work.

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The European Court of Justice ruling is reinforced in Britain by the anti-trade-union laws introduced by the Tory gov-ernment and continued by New Labour. This body of law in effect makes trades unions liable in law for the actions of their members in the event of disputes. It fits in with the employers’ need for a segregated, divided workforce that can be bussed around Europe at will, and then sent back to their country of origin when the job in question has been finished.

Resentment by British-based workers against the em-ployers’ divide and rule approach had been building up for some time, and one trade union, Unite, had tried to devel-op its own policy to cope with the situation:

Unite sought assurances that Alstrom would provide a level playing field for UK workers to include a clause in the tendering process whereby any sub-contractor would endeavour to use UK or local la-bour.

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But this policy failed, as it was bound to do, when Alstrom appointed Remark, a non-UK company who point blank decided to ignore Unite’s representations. Under the title ‘Outrage at the Power Plant’, the Unite journal United re-ported:

Hundreds of skilled unemployed construction workers began sustained demonstrations outside the Staythorpe power station in Nottinghamshire early in January, after energy giant Alstrom refused them work on the site.

4

The Staythorpe power station, in Nottinghamshire — and centre of the Union of Democratic Miners’ strike-breaking activity which contributed so much to the defeat of the NUM in 1984-85 — was the spark that ignited a series of unofficial strikes, most notably at the Lindsey Oil Refinery. These strikes, all of them unofficial and therefore repudiat-ed by the trades unions, have demonstrated a number of different things. Firstly, unofficial action is a direct chal-lenge to the employers, the trade union bureaucracy, and the British and European anti-trade-union laws. By taking unofficial action, the workers made the anti-trade-union law inoperable in the way that the ruling class and their

2. Labour Briefing, March 2009. 3. United, Spring 2009.

4. Ibid.

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allies wanted it to work. The law at present targets its sanc-tions against the official resources of the trade union movement. Yet once trade union officials had repudiated these strikes, the unions avoided any possibility of legal sanction.

For both the employers and the trade union bureaucra-cy, the unofficial action walked around the edges of the law, and disrupted the whole system of industrial relations which has existed in this country for the last 25 years.

The employers rely on threatening official trades unions with legal sanction if they endorse membership-initiated action. This pushes the unions into a corner, as they try desperately to control members’ action, often resulting in sell-outs or settlements below potential outcomes. The unofficial action in effect bypassed the law, undermined the employers’ pressure points on the union, and reduced the trades union bureaucracy’s role in negotiating a return to work.

However, it would be quite wrong to draw the conclu-sion that the trades union bureaucracy’s role in bargaining over the sale of labour-power is finished. In fact the work-ers in many ways were implementing the official policy of their own organisations:

Unite sought assurances Alstrom would provide a level playing field for UK workers during the process for sub-contracting and pressed Alstrom to include a clause in the tendering process whereby any sub-contractor would endeavour to use UK or local la-bour.

5

Given this policy approach, it is understandable that social-chauvinism raised its ugly head in the form of the slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and no amount of self-imposed denial or excuse-mongering will wash this prob-lem away. In the March issue of Labour Briefing, Jerry Hicks, the left candidate for Joint General Secretary of Unite, standing on a policy which included a commitment to take only a skilled workers’ wage if elected, gave his ex-planation for the outburst of social-chauvinism amongst the strikers:

I was worried when at the start of the strike I saw placards saying ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. On the first day of the strike, all the official stewards re-signed and the six-member unofficial strike com-mittee wasn’t elected until the second day. This created a temporary political vacuum of leader-ship and in the absence of Unite union banners some of the strikers made their own placards, using Gordon Brown’s words: ‘British Jobs for British Workers’.

6

This clearly confirms the willingness of the membership to try and implement, by unofficial means if necessary, the official policy of the official leadership. To underline the point about just how strong and popular the social chauvin-ist approach is, the Unite magazine reported on the thoughts of a member who was embroiled in the earlier dispute at Staythorpe:

The government must take notice of what is hap-

5. Ibid.

6. Labour Briefing, March 2009.

pening to our industry and stop foreign labour com-ing in to do work that we are qualified and available to do… This is our trade and we should be given first opportunity of the work. The only reason they are bringing foreign labour in is because it is cheaper and the power companies can make more money on top of the millions of pounds of profit they make anyway.

7

Clearly, leadership and policy can and did play a decisive role in the outcome of the Lindsey dispute. As Owen Jones from the Labour Representation Committee put it in his article in the March issue of Labour Briefing:

The strike leaders made clear that this was no racist strike. ‘We’ve got more in common with people around the world than with the employers who are doing this to us’, strike leader Keith Gibson de-clared. The demands of the Lindsey Strike Commit-tee — which were influenced by Socialist Party com-rades, whose role must be applauded — included the unionisation of immigrant labour, trade union assistance for immigrant workers and the building of links with construction workers on the conti-nent.

8

Although the trade union bureaucracy was sidelined during the recent disputes, it is not dead, and if this movement continues and threatens to erupt on a much larger scale, it may well decide to ride the social-chauvinist tiger, as a way to rebuild its base of support. If the official movement does go for this option, then it will try to isolate the socialist and trades unionist leadership from the mass of the reformist, economist membership. Assisting the reassertion of bu-reaucratic control is something that the bourgeoisie might yet find both acceptable and necessary, if they are faced with an ever-widening and deepening upsurge of working-class opposition to the current economic meltdown. That is why opposition to social-chauvinism and support for inter-nationalism is not a luxury, but a vital integral part of re-building the working class.

The present political framework allows the courts and the employers to target the resources of the trade union movement in the form of heavy fines and legal costs. No matter how many times the TUC and its affiliates pass mo-tions of opposition to the anti-union laws, in reality the bureaucracy always backs down. This creates the political basis for opportunism, as the official policy does one thing, but the statements of the leadership proclaim the opposite. In this soil the seeds of demoralisation and chauvinism will only grow bigger. An unofficial movement from below, con-trolled by the membership, and organising around an ac-tion programme of independent class struggle, can start to challenge this paralysis.

But sooner or later the official movement will have to grasp the nettle of its relations with New Labour or run the risk of being dragged down in its wake, as the government attempts the impossible task of managing its way out of an economic crisis created by the capitalist system, without making structural inroads into the unaccountable centres of power.

7. United, Spring 2009.

8. Ibid.


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Armand Robin

Letter to the Gestapo

Armand Robin (1912-1961) has recently been celebrated at the

excellent website A contretemps, Bulletin de critique bibli-

ographique. (http://acontretemps.org/) to which our readers

are urged. Robin was a polyglot to the extreme, fluent in 26

languages, translating poetry in 13 of them (including Pasternak,

Shakespeare, Essenin, Mickiewicz, Ungaretti). After graduating

he visited Russia in 1934, and was deeply shocked by the reality

he found. Despite this he remained a supporter of the French

Communist Party through the Popular Front period, before

joining the anarchist movement in 1943. Most of his poetry was

published by the anarchists, and he turned his back on the rec-

ognised publishing houses. He was a great enthusiast for the

potential of radio, seeing (perhaps hearing) in it a route to

overcoming barriers between nationalities. This has been de-

scribed, not unfairly, as a precursor of some of the utopian

views of the internet. Among the anarchists he became a distin-

guished polemicist and writer of articles, of which the item

below is a splendid example.

Robin actually sent this letter to the Gestapo. He had a few

months earlier written to the Nazi authorities in Paris demand-

ing to be added to the official blacklist of writers, for having

translated Mayakovsky. They obliged. I am obliged to Ian

Birchall for discovering that Robin’s original words ‘jeannots

lapin’ were the then current French translation of Beatrix Pot-

ter’s ‘Peter Rabbit’

JJ Plant

S evidence, a little too heavy, of human degeneration, information has reached me that certain French citi-

zens have denounced me to you as being not at all among the number of those who approve of you.

I cannot do otherwise, gentlemen, than confirm these words and wretched writings. It is very true that I disap-prove with a disapprobation for which there is no name in any language I know (or probably even in the Hebrew lan-guage that you give me the desire to study). You are killers, gentlemen, and I would even add (this is a view which I hold strongly) that you are ridiculous killers. You are not unaware that I specialise in listening to foreign radio sta-tions, and I learn valuable details about your activities, but, the characteristic of criminals being above all to be igno-rant, should I waste time pointing out to you the motorised gas chambers that you send into Russian cities? Or the camps, where, with perfected art, you put to death millions of innocent people in Poland?

If I write to you directly, gentlemen, it is to remedy the lack of talent among my denouncers; this variety of the human species, particularly common in the virtuous re-gimes, lacks subtlety and perfection; I am convinced that it did not denounce me to you with the expertise required in that profession. Shall I tell you that in this lack of skill there is something that shocked me and I mean to correct? I

should like, from simple taste for style, to supplement the deficiencies of those who wish my death.

I am tired of vague threats, imprecise dangers, warnings restated, anxieties not brought to the extreme. You create, gentlemen, a world where we no longer know whether it is better to be arrested immediately or to be told every morn-ing: ‘Beware of your eyesight, take heed to your steps, look out for your fingers, your shoulders, your toes, because everything in you is very dangerous!’ They want, gentle-men, to prevent me from taking the smallest step because, they tell me, your wrath hangs over me; well, gentlemen, not only have I decided to continue to make steps, but also I have decided to run.

Fame, this goddess who is thriving so much at the mo-ment, is spreading the word throughout the city that I am crazy. Without doubt this is what is holding you back. I want to destroy this scruple in you even though it is benefi-cial to me; I can assure you that I am the opposite of crazy and I have a very exact awareness of everything that I am doing. It is not crazy to speak the truth in all circumstanc-es, the truth is always good to say, and especially when it is sure to be punished. The enjoyment I have in saying to you directly: ‘killers, you are killers’ exceeds the enjoyment you will have in killing me.

I should like to be threatened with precision. On the other hand it would show disrespect to the order of assassi-nation, which is becoming the customary order of these times, to oblige candidates for my assassination to go searching throughout the city to find me; my current ad-dress, gentlemen is know to almost everybody; here it is! Come! I do not go out! I even leave the door open. You will find me without difficulty in these very morning hours when, like a new kind of Peter Rabbit, you start enjoying your unpublished frolics.

Gentlemen, you have no doubt been somewhat sur-prised that at the top of this letter, you are named: ‘Evi-dence rather too heavy, of human degeneration’; it is un-likely that the peculiar French citizens who attend you will be able to explain the meaning of this term; I am inclined to believe that they hardly understand French, so I have to waste a little time to inform you that this designation was suggested to me by the well-known gravity your footsteps and the equally well-known sound of your boots.

You have singular arguments, gentlemen, to propagate the idea that your race is superior: they are arguments of leather. I might add, gentlemen, finally to turn to the Ger-many that you purport to represent, that I feel every day a great pity for my brother, the German worker in uniform. You murdered, gentlemen, my brother, the German worker and I will not refuse, as you can see, to be murdered next to him. 5 October 1943

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JJ Plant

Recent Exhibitions

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia

UCHAMP, Man Ray, Picabia at Tate Powerstation was the first opportunity to look at much of the work of

Marcel Duchamp in London since the 1966 show at Tate Real where Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of the ‘large glass’ was unveiled. Since then, Duchamp has been made to carry the blame for the trivialisation and capriciousness of ‘new art’, and most heinously for the Saatchi/Goldsmiths wagonload of monkeys. High time, then, to consider whether those charges are justified.

Both Tates have fallen prey to the obsessive need to peddle ‘narrative’, instead of doing a gallery’s job — show-ing work. The virulent subspecies of this infection, ‘triadic narrative’, takes the form of grouping artists in threes and constructing a story about real or imagined interactions among them as the wellspring of their creativity. Turner, Whistler, Monet at Tate Real a couple of years ago was a textbook specimen.

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia attempts to tell the story of three major innovators in twentieth-century art (and ‘anti-art’), as if their friendships and attempts at mutual under-standing were central. This thesis is not entirely without merit, but is overstated. For example, Duchamp’s immense-ly talented and successful artistic family receive minimal attention. For example, the political rage of Dada and the sometimes sharper incisions of Surrealism are marginalised as formative influences.

The curator’s interests would be of little concern, were it not for the fact that the exhibition visitor is obliged to finance them handsomely to get the catalogue. Since a typi-cal London catalogue will run at about 20 quid (plus maybe a tenner admission) it is not a minor question. Compared to the 1966 catalogue, you get much bigger and better col-our images of the works, grouped however not historically but according to didactic requirements of the various effu-sive essayists whose tiresome verbiage fills up the book. This didactic autocracy has been the major problem with Tate Powerstation since it opened. Somebody should tell them: ‘Show the work and shut up!’

Perversely, I should say that at least some of the essay-writing in the catalogue tends towards defending the three experimenters against the paternity suits that would foist the spawn of Saatchi upon them. Some of it illustrates how the work is not capricious or arbitrary, but arises from rig-orous, unorthodox thinking and feeling. Duchamp in par-ticular was diligent in documenting the routes through personal imagery he took to arrive at ‘The Large Glass’.

For all my grumpiness about it, I would have recom-mended seeing this show. In 1966, Duchamp’s final work was unknown, having been created in conditions of com-plete secrecy. Here at least some elements of it could be

seen. While little of the Man Ray material will be unknown to regular exhibition goers, the opposite is the case for the Picabia. My biggest disappointment, however, drawing again on comparison with the 1966 show, was that conclud-ing his 1966 note, Richard Hamilton quoted Duchamp from 1961: ‘I’m nothing else but an artist… I couldn’t be very much more iconoclastic any more.’ This could have been the launch point for the 2008 show, a reconsideration of the self-myth on the basis of which a huge market has been floated. It could even have generated a ‘narrative’ worth following, and challenged the hegemony of the kind of ma-terial that wins the Turner Prize.

The American Scene

The special exhibitions at the British Museum’s Print Room are almost always worth an hour’s investigation (which is more than can be said for their historical ‘block-buster’ exhibitions in the old Reading Room, which with each suc-cessive exhibition show more signs of being hurriedly as-sembled to maintain the flow of tourist revenue).

Last summer’s special print show was The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, covering the period 1905 to 1960. Naturally enough, a main theme emerging from this period was urban life, and its deleterious impact on the physical and spiritual lives of the urban workers and their families. Only the roughest sketch can be given of such a huge topic.

The exhibition opened with selections from the ‘Ashcan School’, led by John Sloan. As its name suggests (reminis-cent of the ‘kitchen sink’ label applied to social realism in the UK 1960s/1970s), it concerned itself with depicting the lives of the workers and poor in the cities. Typically these images are of dark and overcrowded domestic rooms, or of busy bars (some of Sloan’s work is strongly reminiscent of Daumier). These are not dispassionate recordings of social conditions — each picture carries the artist’s conviction that it is not right for people to live that way.

But not every artist has the moral stamina to maintain such an intense social focus. A group of printmakers began to depict the American city as if its people were invisible. Among the first of these was Louis Lozowick. It is ‘piquant’ (as they say on Radio 4) that he developed his near-abstract approach after learning from the Russian revolutionary artists Tatlin, Malevich and El Lissitsky, and deployed this knowledge in a way that eliminated criticism of the condi-tions of life in the heart of imperialism.

A road back to a socially critical position was found by Stuart Davis, who founded and led the American Artists’ Congress. Some of Davis’ paintings can be seen in the UK and mainland Europe, but this was my first opportunity to see his lithographs. He adopted the clean lines and simpli-fied, near abstract compositions from such European artists

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as Leger (as well as from commercial graphic design) to return to images of working life in the cities as oppressive.

Edward Hopper (whose work formed a major exhibition in London in 2004, and who emerged from a similar artistic milieu in New York) also shows a tendency to avoid criti-cism, using great skill to depict the qualities of isolation and alienation as private and inevitable, and not as conse-quences of living under the economy. A variant of the theo-ry of original sin, for people none of whose sins had origi-nality.

This tension between critical realism (often connected with illustrations for the radical press such as New Masses) and the slide away from it into ‘purer’ art ran through the exhibition in a number of interesting ways, making it one of the most rewarding of the summer of 2008. I resist with difficulty describing and commenting on many of the art-ists in this exhibition. It was my first chance to see many of them, and the quality of the exhibition was an endorsement of the BM’s work of collecting and conserving.

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography was an extensive exhibition of material from the Moscow House of Photography Museum, at the Hayward Gallery. Compared to Tate Powerstation, the Hayward is looking a bit run-down and under-financed, but it can still come up with some excellent programming (and their coffee is better). Rodchenko’s application of avant-garde techniques to pho-tography and design probably forms (along with Eisen-stein’s films) most viewers’ visual image of the art of the 1917 revolution. Extreme camera angles, dramatic use of repetitive design elements, bold slabs of colour and type, photomontage — all of these were Rodchenko’s weaponry (though Gustav Klutsis, whose contribution to 1917 includ-ed leading a specialist battalion of the Lettish Rifles, guard-ing the Kremlin, is usually not credited properly for his major contribution to the invention of photomontage).

All enthusiasts for the Russian avant-garde will want to own the catalogue. It documents the material in the exhibi-tion comprehensively, supplementing it with a concise his-torical essay by Alexander Lavrentiev and translations of some of Rodchenko’s texts hitherto only available in Rus-sian in Lavrentiev’s book. In fact, I found the book more enjoyable than the exhibition itself. The bare concrete walls of the Hayward seemed to render the work lifeless. Much of the work in fact was not originally intended to be hung on walls, but to be shown in magazines, in a format very close to that of the catalogue.

This show was a good representation of Rodchenko’s best-known work, and brought in some interesting little-known material showing his circle at work. It also brought together as a series Rodchenko’s portraits of the poet Ma-yakovsky.

Rodchenko’s celebrations of the economic and social achievements of the revolution intended to blur the line between art and propaganda, but only succeeded in part. His compositional techniques applied to the recording of power stations, textile plants, etc, led him to be criticised for ‘formalism’. Some of the attacks made on him and his work (and likewise of his partner Stepanova) seem prepos-terous in retrospect, but in the late 1930s could deprive an artist of his livelihood, possibly his life. The vicious rivalry among artistic tendencies eventually exhausted them and

made them easy prey when ‘socialist realism’ was imposed as a general aesthetic.

The following spring, back at Tate Powerstation, they followed up with Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Construc-tivism. The idea of major London venues cooperating to make good use of the public funds expended on them would have seemed an extraordinary one in the times a few years ago when policy makers still worshipped the blind gods of the market, and these two exhibitions were being planned. Almost certainly there was no such coordination. Now the black night of the soul has fallen on those same policy makers, and the blind gods devour their own off-spring. Perhaps impoverishment falling upon those august public officials will be reflected in a more considered ap-proach.

This was an excellent exhibition, and all the better for coming so close to the other. Its focus was broader, em-bracing the two artists who had worked together extensive-ly, as well as in exhibiting a wider range of media — paint-ing, constructions, drawings and other works on paper, and Popova’s fabric designs. (Also, reconstructions of a workers’ reading room, with furniture that everybody seemed to agree was agonising to sit and read in.)

One of the interesting aspects of the exhibition was that it displayed to perfection the paradox, which affected much of the Russian avant-garde, namely that they set out to be utilitarian (that is, to transform the world in practice), but were most successful in what they defined as the opposite of their aim — the production of beautiful paintings and objects.

That is not to say that Rodchenko and Popova failed to contribute to the transformation of everyday life. Their design for labels and advertisements embody the vigour of the post-revolutionary mood, its determination to raise standards of living for all. Their layouts for books and mag-azines promoted the works of revolutionary artists and the achievements of the Soviet economy to the masses, only then emerging into a condition of mass literacy.

The catalogue is well designed and built, and not over-burdened with self-indulgent essay-mongering. Anybody who buys this catalogue and the one from the Hayward show will have documentation as good as any that has emerged from the Russian galleries in recent years. The sad products of the final years of Rodchenko’s life, when he suffered under the oppression of the cultural bureaucracy that was to exterminate all trace of Lunacharsky’s benevo-lent tolerance of innovation and experimentation, are best disregarded.

Italy’s Divisionist Painters

Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 at the National Gallery was a revelation. In systematically assem-bling and presenting the work of a school of painters for the first time in London it did exactly what a national institu-tion should do. The Divisionists took their name from the practice of ‘dividing’ colour to achieve extraordinary effects of light on canvas. At some stages their technique was simi-lar to that of the French pointillists, creating colour and mood from the juxtaposition of dots of component colours. However, as this exhibition capably showed, they devel-oped an array of additional methods that carried their abil-ity to depict much further. These technical developments included replacing the dots with lines, and using the lines


41

to follow contour. When you look closely into one of the landscapes that fill the opening section of the show, to in-vestigate how the vivid light is created, you find that there are no solid areas of colour at all. Everything consists of Divisionist colour lines that combine to produce an ex-traordinary visual intensity.

The catalogue does its job excellently, reproducing all the important material and providing the necessary back-ground notes, However, no colour printing can reproduce the intensity of colour achieved by the Divisionists. And as so often in London galleries I found myself having to find a viewpoint where there was no reflection from the gallery lighting. In an exhibition concerned primarily with light, this is simply unacceptable.

Among the Divisionists there was a wide range of artis-tic concerns. Some devoted their mastery of the new tech-niques to symbolist subject matter. More interesting, to me, were the radical socialist and anarchist elements, who used the new techniques to present powerful images of the actu-al life of the oppressed during the period of growing disap-pointment and disillusion with the recently formed Italian state. A fine example would be Angelo Morbelli, whose painting In the Rice Fields is on the catalogue cover. In this work Morbelli shows a group of women harvesting rice. The work was harsh, and the life expectancy of the workers was reduced to a little over 20 years by malaria and water-borne parasites. Then the market price of rice crashed under the impact of American and Russian bulk imports of food — a companion painting of the same subject is titled For Eighty Cents!. But In the Rice Fields is not a propaganda piece; it is a masterpiece. It brilliantly deploys all the techniques of divisionism to picture the watery fields of rice, the textures of the women’s fabrics, the fall of sunlight across their bent backs (like an overseer’s whip). In other paintings of the same time Morbelli shows the sad lives led by the elderly in official hostels; the astonishing technical mastery with which he captures the play of light through high windows on polished wood does not detract from the human subject matter — on the contrary, it makes its impact inescapable.

This radical current within Divisionism connected itself with the emerging workers’ struggles. Reflections of a Hun-gry Man by Emilio Longoni, in which a street thief looks from the street at a wealthy couple in a restaurant, was reproduced in a major socialist newspaper, and banned by the state as an incitement to class hatred. Another Longoni shows a proletarian orator addressing a strike rally, while in the background cops charge against the red flag.

The radical current probably reached its high point with Carlo Carra’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, an incident in which police tried to prevent workers holding a mass funeral for a victim of police violence. Here we see one of the aspects of transition from Divisionism to Futurism, where violent, rapid motion becomes a central theme for the painters. Carra was not alone in this transition. Boccio-ni and Balla were among the Divisionists who developed along the same path. But they were quicker than Carra to abandon radical political engagement and human sympa-thy, and to find inspiration in electricity and industry. And it was this essential shift that meant they were to fall prey to Marinetti’s proto-fascist orientation.

A revelation of an exhibition. It is extraordinary that this movement has been so little known for so long, and gratitude is due to the National for this essential correction.

Wyndham Lewis

The National Portrait Gallery provided another opportunity to reflect on the problem of talented right-wingers in its exhibition Wyndham Lewis Portraits. Lewis besmirched his own reputation by an enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler in 1931, and his recantation in 1939 was insufficient to restore it. He also displayed a talent for alienating his friends and potential supporters, among them James Joyce and the Bloomsbury circle.

For all that, as this exhibition capably demonstrates, his modernist portraits and self-portraits show considerable originality and no little talent. Wouldn’t life be that much easier if the right were all pig-ignorant philistines, and if this were obvious to everybody? Lewis, with his friend and collaborator Ezra Pound, are among the most prominent counter-examples. Another is the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Pound and Céline both paid high prices for their opinions. Lewis got off relatively lightly. George Orwell went so far as to think Lewis had converted to left-wing positions.

Close to Lewis and Pound was TS Eliot, whom Lewis was to portray brilliantly on a number of occasions. While never espousing fascism, Eliot’s prejudices against Jews and blacks led him into some gross depictions (not all of which were intended for public consumption) that deeply embar-rass and trouble those who recognise the greatness of much of his poetry.

It is a severe test for any portraitist to be shown in the National Portrait Gallery, where the highest quality compe-tition is always crowding in. Lewis’ work is more than capa-ble of meeting the test. No less an authority than Walter Sickert responded to Lewis’ portrait of Rebecca West, writ-ing that he was ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’. That is simply too much (if anybody wants to know, I reserve that award for Rembrandt). Nevertheless, we see here a major talent at work, recording and commenting on important figures of his time. His eyesight eventually failed. In his final phase he again portrayed Eliot, with only a small diminution of the talent of his earlier images.

The catalogue is especially to be recommended — well designed and informative with good reproductions of all the work.

Villhem Hammershøi

The Royal Academy mounted a celebration of the Danish painter Villhem Hammershøi (1864–1916) alongside its an-nual Summer Exhibition, under the title The Poetry of Si-lence. Like Radical Light this was a case of a national insti-tution doing its job properly, bringing forward neglected talent, displaying it well and not interpreting it to death.

If Hammershøi were working today he would certainly be thought somewhat odd — he might even be shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The bulk of his work consists of very carefully painted interiors of his apartment in Copenhagen, frequently including the figure of his wife with her back to the painter/viewer. (He was to complain late in his career that his buyers dictated continuation of these interiors to him; that his landscapes were not in demand.) He acquired a reputation for being a very private, taciturn person, but combined this with a consistent public position of sponsor-ing the independent alternatives to the ‘official’ art acade-my. And he travelled widely with his wife, especially to


42

London where he painted some lovely views of the British Museum and nearby streets.

But if the interiors came to define the public perception of Hammershøi, it can only have been so as a result of the intensity he brought to bear on this aspect of his work, and the resonance it struck among the Danish public (turning inwards after the definitive amputation of former Danish territory by Germany). In his depiction of it, the Ham-mershøi apartment was almost empty of personal property. We see walls, doors, windows, hung pictures, in muted colours. The view to the exterior is rarely clear. Often the figure of his wife is gazing out at it, silent. Overall, the ef-fect is colder and quieter than the Dutch interiors that in-spired it.

Among the comparisons that come to mind are the ‘metaphysical’ painters such as Chirico and Morandi, where there is a sense that something absent from the picture is the true subject, that what is imminent is more important than what is present. But Hammershøi seems to cut this possibility away from under his own feet by repeating the theme in endless variations, as if trying to assert: ‘This is it; there is nothing more.’ As the catalogue points out several times, the figure of Hammershøi’s wife often, on close look-ing, floats above the surface of the silent rooms she occu-pies, not actually physically in contact with the floor. Some-times the same is true even of the furniture, and occasional-ly there are strange, unaccountable contradictions in the ways shadows of chairs are cast by the light from windows. It is almost as if the petit-bourgeois realm of the private home has become so intensified as to exclude even those whose home it is supposed to be.

From Russia

From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 From Moscow and St Petersburg was the Royal Academy’s major winter exhibition, and presented major works held by four important institutions in Moscow and Leningrad.

In pre-revolutionary Russia the developing bourgeoisie turned often to France for reasons of trade, and in the course of international business visits acquired a taste for new French culture, painting in particular. Among the en-thusiastic collectors, the two most important were Morozov and Shchukin (though the catalogue provides information on several others), whose massive industrial wealth allowed them to build collections of world importance, purchasing and commissioning the most innovative French painters — Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Braque. Painters of other nationalities who were making their mark in Paris — Van Gogh, Picasso — were also eagerly collected. It is un-deniable that the Russian collectors were often ahead of the curve in spotting and buying important works, and building the basis of a Russian national collection of international contemporary art. The ‘French’ half of this exhibition shows the fruits of this collecting. Many splendid pieces by these artists, as good as or better than the best examples available in London and Paris, had never previously been seen in London. For my (very insubstantial) money, a selection of the Moscow Cezannes was the high point. On those occa-sions when I have visited Moscow I have never missed the opportunity to see them, and it was good to be able to con-firm my recollection of their quality.

But however excellent the French material, the artists and their work are well known, and there were no real sur-

prises from the art-historical point of view. The main value in the exhibition was the Russian work, much of it by painters who have had little exposure in Britain.

Whenever the opportunity has arisen I have complained in print about the neglect of Isaac Levitan, the great land-scape painter, so it was good to have some of his material shown in London. The same was true of Petrov-Vodkin. London should find the space for shows of both these painters, whose work is too little known outside Russia. Filonov is the third Russian painter for whom I demand a major exhibition. He was represented by only one piece, and that was poorly lit. The intense complexity of his synthetic images requires equally intense viewing, and that is simply not possible when gallery lights reflect off large areas of the surface.

One welcome feature of the exhibition was recognition of the contribution of women to the avant-garde, with a group of good pieces from Exter, Rozanova, Udaltsova and Popova. A short essay in the catalogue argues for the merits of the female contribution, in the distinctiveness of compo-sition and colour they brought.

Hopefully this exhibition will be a take-off point for fur-ther explorations of Russian painting.

Cezanne

The Courtauld Gallery also made a feature of Cezanne with their Summer 2008 exhibition The Courtauld Cezannes. Although this was a relatively small show, occupying only one large room, it assembled all of the Courtauld’s material, including the well-known landscapes in oils and the card-player portrait, with some less often displayed drawings and other works on paper. When I visited, it was mainly a summer holiday crowd, but the exhibition was a serious contribution to art history (as befits the Courtauld’s posi-tion), with the display and the catalogue devoted to investi-gating Cezanne’s methods and philosophy. Cezanne’s letters to the young painter Emile Bernard have been re-translated for the catalogue, and will be valuable for both painters and art-historians. I learned a great deal about how he achieved his colour effects and formed his complex compositions.

Walter Sickert

The Courtauld Gallery showed Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes over the winter of 2007-08 — a less festive show it would be difficult to suggest. These paintings, drawings and other works on paper, from the first decade of the twentieth century, are among the most challenging, confrontational images produced by any English painter of the human figure, equalled only by such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. But Sickert’s pictures, for all their con-cern with painterly questions, never allow the viewer to escape into the aesthetic realm. Nobody can doubt for a moment that his models are available precisely because of their poverty — titles such as ‘What Shall We Do About the Rent?’ scarcely require subtle interpretation. Some of the models are known to have been prostitutes. Even 120 years after the event, there is the more than uncomfortable knowledge that the viewer who can afford the admission fee (these days modest enough by the standards of major galleries) is paying not just to see the artist’s work but also to exploit the model’s poverty and vulnerability, which were essential elements in the process of making these im-ages. (This concern has to a degree been raised by the huge global availability of ‘pornography’ on the internet, and the


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belief that in at least some of it there is real victimisation, economic or physical.) Sickert’s cynical publicity-seeking, linking these works with the 1907 murder of a prostitute in Camden Town, adds to the unease.

The paintings and other pictures merited more atten-tion than the show received, for all the reasons that made the show worth seeing. The London art establishment can cope with the soilings of a feminist artist’s baby, or the bloodstained bedding of a Saatchi-sponsored drunk. Sickert found and exceeded the limits of such acceptability a cen-tury before they had been drawn.

The crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell devoted a substantial book to attempting to prove that Sickert was the Whitechapel serial murderer of prostitutes, ‘Jack the Ripper’. Her effort was based on extensive forensic exami-nations, financed by herself, no doubt with no support whatsoever from her publishers. The ‘science’ of DNA iden-tification is less than 20 years old — and Cornwell claims to have discovered a match between a letter that may have been written by Sickert and one of the very numerous Rip-per hoax letters, both documents being tested nearly 100

years after being written and having been stored in condi-tions far from compliant with the standards of evidence that would stand up even in a UK court. But in ‘new sci-ence’ you can get what you can pay for — just look at the disputes over the DNA analyses of the alleged Romanov remains (as all those fair-weather supporters of Paul Foot should have done before giving him the Judas kiss over DNA ‘evidence’ in the Hanratty case).

But the JtR controversy is a distraction from the core importance of this Sickert show, which is to put the viewer (subject, as the professionals of cultural studies will have it) into a new and unbearable relationship with the victim (object, as the professionals of cultural studies will have it). Whether any of the subjects was Emily Dimmock, the vic-tim in the ‘Camden Town murder’, is not to the point. Sick-ert shows that any pauper could have been, and, by reflec-tion, any viewer could have been the killer. This achieve-ment in the first decade of the twentieth century has been outdone only in scale (certainly neither in intensity nor painterly skill) in the following eleven decades.

Chris Gray

Joseph Conrad and Imperialism

OMPARED with the likes of, say, Rudyard Kipling, Jo-seph Conrad is not an overtly ideological and political

writer. Kipling explicitly defended British imperialism (see his poem ‘Recessional’); Conrad, whatever doubts he may have had about specific cases — of which more later — accepts white imperialism in general as a fact of life, a framework which he does not question. No more than Kip-ling does he have any alternative model of international relations to be advanced: his interest lies elsewhere, in how humans adapt to and surmount the challenges that they face, their response as individuals.

Despite this, however, Conrad has some interesting things to say about the impact of imperialism in the Dutch East In-dies (modern Indonesia). During his sailing years Conrad made some four voyages in the area, visiting Singapore, Java and Borneo. These experiences led him to write his first pub-lished novel, Almayer’s Folly, which appeared in print in 1895. This was the last in what was to be a trilogy of novels, of which the first was The Rescue (first published in 1920) and the se-cond An Outcast of the Islands (1896). One of the chief charac-ters in these novels is Tom Lingard, who is frequently referred to by his Malay appellation ‘Raja Laut’ (‘King of the Sea’). This character is based on a real historical individual, one William Lingard (1829-1888), master of a number of known vessels, who was engaged in trade in an area on the east coast of Bor-neo (Kalimantan), namely that of the Berau river. He was as-sisted in this trade by a certain William Charles Olmeijer (1848-1900), the original of Almayer. William Lingard was clearly a colourful character: Roland Braddell, in a contribution to One Hundred Years of Singapore, writes:

It is related of him that finding it impossible to obtain payment of a very large sum of money from a certain Bornean Sultan, he landed his crew, stormed the Sul-tan’s palace, and captured His Highness, who promptly paid up! (Quoted by Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, Cambridge University Press, 1966, p 104)

The notes to An Outcast of the Islands say that the title ‘Raja Laut’ was given to William Lingard by the Sultan of Gunung Tabur (in Berau) in 1862, ‘perhaps as a reward for assistance rendered in a fight with the praus [ships] of the neighbouring Sultan of Bulungan’ (Oxford World Classics edition, p 86).

Even without knowing these details, Conrad’s portrait of Tom Lingard as a bluff straight-talking (and on occasions ruthless) English seaman is wholly believable. An atmos-phere of violence accompanies the man: as he explains in The Rescue:

Do you understand what I mean, Mrs Travers? … They are afraid of me because I know how to fight this brig. They fear the brig because when I am on board her, the brig and I are one. (Dodo Press edition, p 166)

All this is, of course, totally consistent with the modus op-erandi of imperialism, which relies on superior force in or-der to put its machinery of exploitation in place. But the really interesting thing is that Conrad goes on to give a snapshot of that exploitative machinery in one of its guises. In An Outcast of the Islands, Babalatchi, the Malay politi-cian, explains Lingard’s hold on Berau:

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Babalatchi went on to relate the facts connected with Lingard’s action. … That unbeliever kept the Faithful panting under the weight of his senseless oppression. They had to trade with him — accept such goods as he would give — such credit as he would accord. And he exacted payment every year…

‘Very true!’ exclaimed Sahamin and Bahassoen together. …

Sahamin got up, staff in hand, and spoke to Ab-dulla with ponderous courtesy, emphasising his words by the solemn flourishes of his right arm.

‘It is so. We are weary of paying our debts to that white man here [Almayer] who is the son of the Ra-jah Laut. That white man — may the grave of his mother be defiled! — is not content to hold us all in his hand with a cruel grasp. He seeks to cause our very death. He trades with the Dyaks of the forest, who are no better than monkeys. He buys from them guttah and rattans — while we starve. Only two days ago I went to him and said “Tuan Almayer” — even so; we must speak politely to that friend of Satan — “Tuan Almayer, I have such and such goods to sell. Will you buy?” And he spoke thus — because those white men have no understanding of any courtesy — he spoke to me as if I were a slave: “Daoud, you are a lucky man… you are a lucky man to have anything in these hard times. Bring your goods quickly, and I shall receive them in payment of what you owe me from last year.” And he laughed, and struck me on the shoulder with his open hand. May Jehannum [Hell] be his lot.’

‘We will fight him’ said young Bahassoen, crisp-ly. ‘We shall fight if there is help and a leader. Tuan Abdulla, will you come among us?’ (pp 89-90)

Abdulla, the Arab trader, establishes himself as a rival to Lingard & Co, and the lot of the natives is presumably eased.

Malay characters abound in the trilogy, and, in the ab-sence of evidence to the contrary, the depiction of Malay society in the mid-nineteenth century that emerges seems plausible enough. Obviously Conrad could not get every detail right. Sir Hugh Clifford, writing in the Singapore Free Press of 1 September 1898, complains that:

The prime minister, Babalatchi, yawns and stretches himself while conversing with his King. Had he done so in real life the poor dear man would have ceased to live. … The youths in the King’s presence are represented as lying about sprawling over the floor and kicking their heels in the air. Mr Conrad’s Malays eat sirih in a manner for which Mr Conrad alone is responsible. It is, perhaps, merely a detail, but sirih could not be consumed in the manner de-scribed. (Quoted by Norman Sherry, Conrad’s East-ern World, p 139)

Exactly, a mere detail. The description of the behaviour in the sovereign’s presence is less excusable, maybe, but Con-rad’s acquaintance with the archipelago, despite its length in time, was not sufficient to give him mastery over all as-pects of Malay life, and he had to rely on written sources to supplement his knowledge. Norman Sherry argues fairly convincingly that Conrad’s errors are largely those of his sources (see Conrad’s Eastern World, p 140). Sherry gives an

apposite quote from Aristoteles, from the Poetics: ‘… it is not the poet’s province to relate such things as have actual-ly happened, but such as might have happened — such as are possible, according either to probable or necessary con-sequence.’

In my view, Heart of Darkness, which is explicitly about imperialism, is less successful than the trilogy. By compari-son with his two years in the Dutch East Indies, Conrad’s acquaintance with the Belgian Congo was much shorter, some six months, in 1890. There are two reasons, I think, why the story does not have the same impact as the trilogy. One is the character of Belgian imperialism in the Congo itself: it was an extreme case. Conrad’s account centres on the enigmatic figure of Kurtz, an agent who brings in more ivory than anyone else and who organises raids on areas bordering his own locality; he is also involved in some mys-terious savage rites whose nature we do not get to learn in detail but which seem to fit in with Western stereotypes of savage barbarism. The effect is heightened by Kurtz’s ex-clamation: ‘The horror!’ While this presumably accords with denunciations of King Leopold’s policies later brought forward by Morrell and Sir Roger Casement, it does not provide a detailed account. Correspondingly, the Africans themselves figure as hardly more than bit-players. They say very little: indeed the sole observation is the famous remark of the manager’s boy: ‘Mistah Kurtz — he dead.’

The story is not without its merits: the absurdity of many imperialist actions comes out well in the account of a French ship firing into the jungle:

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war an-chored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears that the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the pro-ceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board as-suring me earnestly there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight somewhere. (Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, Wordsworth Classics edition, pp 41-42)

It appears that Conrad in the last year of his life described the imperialist carve-up of Africa as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ (‘Geography and Some Ex-plorers’, in Last Essays, Dent, 1955, p 17). Unfortunately, Heart of Darkness was the nearest he got to an artistic rep-resentation of this judgement.

Conrad never set out to paint a full portrait of imperial-ism, but it is a measure of a great writer that he or she should be able to capture the spirit of the age — in passing, as it were.


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Reviews

Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity, November Publi-cations, 2008

Mark Steel, What’s Going On?, Simon and Schuster, 2008

O, comrade, where art thou?

O you lean towards supporting centre-left parties or waiting for the Crisis to Mature, maybe preferring di-

rect action events with matching websites and wristbands? The trouble with all these options, amid the pedestrian work of union and campaign meetings, is that they now seem not much more than fruitless. In the face though of so many pilloried bankers and unpopular wars, isn’t it strange that we’re still pondering which strategy we can feel confi-dent about? Perhaps it’s just timely to ask again: what is to be done?

Both these books address this. Macnair’s, a survey of twen-tieth-century Marxist tactics, is the more substantial. While the other, from activist-comedian Mark Steel, part memoir, part rumination on direct action, has its own note to add.

Mike Macnair writes for the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker, the pages of which he is not afraid to refer to in this slim but comprehensive history of revolu-tionary strategies. Would you be surprised to learn he thinks the twentieth century left has made mistakes? What’s more, too many are still making them, often com-pounding them with moves earlier activists would have blanched at. Respect for Muslim businessmen?

Macnair discusses a succession of tactics over the last 100 years or so, starting with the Left, Right and Centre of the Second International. In Kautsky’s Centre he finds the right amount of patience, the slow building of a mass prole-tarian movement, but observes, as many before him, the faction’s incapacity when confronted with the national chauvinism of the First World War.

Macnair’s targets are twofold. First, the social democrat-ic strategy of taking power by entering government coali-tions and popular fronts; the other the more ‘ultra’ waiting for a crisis then calling for a general strike which is sup-posed to educate the proletariat, though, in practice, usual-ly only brings an élite to power. These wrong roads, Mac-nair closely argues, are the inheritance of twentieth-century struggles, internal and public, the remains of which still organises much thinking on the left.

Instead Macnair favours ‘a strategy of indeed patience’, like Kautsky’s, but one that is radical-democratic and doesn’t think or work within the existing order of nation-states. In fact, the working-class movement should remain independent of the state, at least in a constructive, effec-tively, ‘propaganda’, phase, organising on an international or at least continental basis, and integrating republican demands (freedom of speech, assembly, etc) with socialist aspirations. No room here for the parliamentary protest

career of a Dennis Skinner. This alternative of Macnair’s has come in for criticism. One being that it underestimates the resistance of the capitalist state (that is, the state, that de-velopment of capitalism from absolutist beginnings). To-day’s bailout/bossy boots, increasingly authoritarian state won’t wait for the open gathering of a socialist majority.

John Robinson in the Weekly Worker also took Macnair to task for not seeing the necessity of a vanguard party, precisely to combat those ‘wrong roads’ the book identifies — Stalinism, social democracy and ultra-leftism. A party of organised advanced intellectuals isn’t a popular party but the ‘conscious expression of the unconscious historical pro-cess: namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the prole-tariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings’ (Trot-sky, In Defence of Marxism, p 126). Which sounds to me, how-ever large or small the membership, like a minority know-ing best again, or ‘bureaucratic centralism’ as the CPGB call it.

It seems rather that Macnair’s idea of a party, or if you will, a movement, is premised on the recognition that the historical change that was supposed to come after 1917 can’t be anybody’s unconscious process. The party must be con-scious and open and large, in order to be effective in challeng-ing the state. The state will be — is — repressive, but there are no short cuts, no replacing the class by the party, no hiding behind fronts, no secret committees or conspiracy of the advanced. Even if underground, it cannot be a minority.

If all that is left then is building the party (or the movement) we need to tackle that seldom-discussed sub-ject: democratic centralism. The recent debacle of the Campaign for a Marxist Party has proved the urgency of this — how do we work together in a way that is not a ‘dip-lomatic coalition’ as in popular fronts, or alternatively the faith culture of a sect? What is freedom of criticism com-bined with unity of action? Of course, the right to organise factions is a basic. The CMP, a case in point, began as the coming together of several groups in some agreement. However, organised for consensus, the structure couldn’t handle the raising of unacknowledged differences. Personal antipathies apart, the failure to find a means of represent-ing factions was decisive.

The task then of avoiding a one-faith monolith brings up the question of programme. Macnair has indicated that he favours a minimal programme, in some ways not much more than the three fundamental demands of independ-ence from the state, internationalism and democratisation. A minimal programme, however, is open to the charge that it may conceal a hidden agenda or that people won’t find it entirely relevant to their interests. Yet, with a more com-prehensive programme, I would argue, there is the risk of members becoming committed to its, and the group’s, sur-vival exclusively: dogma encouraging sectarianism and con-trol freakery. Better, a minimal programme combined with a continuous debate of tactics.

This is the place to bring in Mark Steel’s book and the

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claims of the new direct action. Steel’s major concerns, apart from taking leave of the Socialist Workers Party, is the popular frontist campaign Respect and the anti-globalisation movement, among other loosely-organised initiatives. Steel straddles the decades between the confi-dent campaigns and parties of the 1970s and more dis-persed, often Net arranged, actions of today. Steel applauds the recent initiatives but has doubts about their reach.

Boycotts have proved more effective than I ever im-agined, but to be at their most powerful they do re-quire a level of organisation with meetings and pro-test arranged to publicise them… The courage of ac-tivists who’ve cycled to Palestine [and other such di-rect actions] has had a greater impact than I antici-pated, but it would be greater still if the network was in place, as it was 20 years ago, to take these people round to trade union branches, to student unions and community groups to suggest what eve-ryone can do to participate.

On Respect, the leftist attempt to build a broader move-ment, Steel is more confused, disappointed and funny. The campaign seemed to have a lot going for it, attracting many anti-Bush/Blair forces. Unfortunately the leadership was an alliance of Egotists. In Steel’s tale George Galloway comes across as a prima donna — whether praising Saddam or acting the pussy cat on Big Brother. The other player in the coalition, the SWP, appears as a clique of politically reticent activists willing opportunistically to work with anybody, but not actually able to work with anyone on an equal basis. It’s extraordinary that the professional relationship of these bigheads lasted as long it did.

After Galloway dared to criticise the national secretary (proprietor SWP) in an internal document, he was roundly condemned by his ‘allies’ for trying to start a witch-hunt. It all peaked in two separate Respect conferences on the day there should only have been one. An invited speaker from the Green Party attended and spoke at the Galloway gig then went to double-up at the pro-SWP rally. He arrived just in time to hear a SWP speaker on the platform de-nounce the other conference with: ‘You know who they’ve got speaking there? A middle-class bourgeois-liberal from the Green Party.’ Again, coalitions are hard, if you don’t get the premises worked out.

While Macnair zeroes in on the alternate mistakes of too much concession in coalitions or too little in sect build-ing, Steel’s concern is with too little organisation. Steel’s ideal kind of movement is not quite modelled after Rock Against Racism but something that aspires to be longer lasting. He is mainly concerned with the new direct action. Even as he pays tribute to the vital urge to outfox and strike at the Power, Steel recognises their lack of connection to a wider body. Not enough meetings are being held, not enough leaflets distributed, not enough public rallies, for these actions to be not much more than punching water: a big splash but little dent.

There are commentators who would have us believe that most people have stopped being interested in a general politi-cal vision at all. Among the enthusiastic, single-issue reform-ism predominates, concern with sectional issues of race, gen-der and the natural environment. In her discussion of these new social movements, Nancy Fraser in Justice Interruptus (Routledge, 1997), states that the answer to the ‘single issue’ is

‘the project of transforming the deep structures of both politi-cal economy and culture [which] appears to be one overarch-ing programmatic orientation capable of doing justice to all current struggles against injustice. It alone does not assume a zero-sum game.’ (p 32) However, Fraser is as conscious as Macnair and Steel that ‘wrong roads’ exist for cultural politics too. For example, ‘affirmative recognition to redress racial in-justices includes cultural nationalism, the effort to assure peo-ple of colour respect by revaluing “blackness”, while leaving unchanged the binary black-white code of black nationalism or black power…’ [italics added]. Alternatively, ‘the long-term goal of deconstructive anti-racism is a culture in which hierar-chical racial dichotomies are replaced by networks of multiple intersecting differences’.

For this to happen, beyond a moralising ‘mission state-ment’, any sectional redress has to be based on a pro-gramme of socio-economic transformation to create a soci-ety of actual equality and republican democracy. Fraser is ready to admit that ‘for this scenario to be psychologically and politically feasible requires that all people be weaned from their attachment to current cultural constructions of their interest and identities’ (p 31). Which I take to mean, willing to go beyond the pluralist contest of which interest group can trump the others, the zero sum game.

This may mean finding the ‘overarching programmatic orientation’ in simply being the opposite of the Enemy that faces us. They don’t belong to a particular caste either, if by that we mean nation, race, even gender. They are the Peo-ple On Top, the ruling class, in all its manifestations, in China, Israel, the US and your borough.

If you went out into most streets and interviewed pass-ers-by, a fair percentage might agree with you on the bom-bardment of Gaza, the invasion of Iraq, the privatisation of the railways and the destruction of the ecosystem by Living Standards, that is, capitalism. They might agree even more heartily about the risks of the surveillance state and the irrational salaries of the managerial élite in both private and public sectors.

Of course, resenting the System is not enough because the major idea in the armoury of the Tops is that though current institutions may have their faults, we, the people, can’t do it ourselves, we cannot run our own affairs either at the local or the international level. We cannot develop a modular, multi-layered global democracy.

So why not make this project the defining badge of affil-iation? Not a concern with a specific discrimination or a particular policy like nationalisation, but a general com-mitment to democratising the world economically, politi-cally and culturally.

Perhaps we could do with trying to improve on another strategy from the twentieth century, the one suggested by Antonio Gramsci: not the creation of a faith or programme, but a culture. Not just one living in the cracks, hoping to take over and then giving in over the long term: which is what happened to the ‘Sixties’ and ‘punk’. Rather, a culture that counters the ‘hegemony’, is not confined to any age group, is independent of the state, inherently international-ist, consciously democratic and committed to fundamental aims of recognition and liberty on the basis of socio-economic equality. There are already dispersed aspirations and initiatives to create a movement embodying this. There is nothing more practical. No short cuts. Mike Belbin


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Lars T Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is To Be Done?’ In Context, Haymarket Books, 2008

HIS is a very important book. It sets out to explain the background and import of Lenin’s celebrated work,

What Is To Be Done?, and does it brilliantly. To have illuminated this highly controversial piece of

writing by Lenin is itself a great achievement, but Lih’s book is valuable as well for the light it throws on a number of other matters — not least the still inadequately appreci-ated German contemporaries, followers and successors of Marx associated with the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD). This review will consider first of all what Lih has to say on this topic, before going on to deal with the specific situation in Russia that gave rise to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?.

Lih correctly points out that Marx and Engels wished to bring about the ‘conquest of political power by the proletar-iat’ (as the Communist Manifesto puts it). In The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, Frie-drich Engels noted that the English workers’ movement was divided into two sections, Chartists and Socialists: he there-fore called for the merger (Verschmelzung) of Socialism with Chartism (see Lih, p 45). According to Lih, the Com-munist Manifesto is basically an essay on the implications of this aim.

In his own way, Ferdinand Lassalle began agitating in Germany along similar lines: his advice to the German workers was that they should form an independent political party to campaign for universal suffrage as a way of obtain-ing state aid for workers’ cooperatives (p 59). Lassalle’s Ar-beiterverein, founded in 1863, was one of the parent organi-sations of what eventually became the SPD, and Lih is to be congratulated on resurrecting Lassalle’s positive achieve-ments, which for a long time have lain submerged as a re-sult of certain undoubted political weaknesses of his, to which attention has often been drawn. (It is worth noting that this view of Lassalle accords with that of Rosa Luxem-burg: see the articles written by her on Lassalle translated by Ben Lewis and published in the Weekly Worker, 15 Janu-ary 2009.)

Moving on from Lassalle, Lih examines the signal con-tribution to international socialism of the German SPD and its principal leader Karl Kautsky (pp 61-110). Kautsky and the SPD have experienced a fate very similar to that of Las-salle, but, in its heyday (roughly 1878 to 1914), the German party was a model for socialists in other countries — signif-icantly in Russia, where Lenin aspired to build a party of a similar type. Consequently, if we are to assess correctly Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, we need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of his German model. Lenin’s text shows several instances of his admiration for the SPD — see Lih, pp 405-13. We learn from Lih that there exists an English translation of What Is To Be Done?, edited by SV Utechin and published by Oxford University Press in 1963, in which these passages have been omitted because the facts that Lenin discusses, according to Utechin, ‘would now be more likely to obscure than to elucidate his reasoning’ (quoted p 413, footnote). Ah, the art of selective quotation!

Lih goes so far as to coin a word — Erfurtianism — which characterised this SPD-derived approach to practical Marxism. Lenin, on this reading, was a passionate Erfurtian. But it appears he was by no means the only Russian one:

according to Lih the Erfurt Programme of the German SPD was itself instrumental in the creation of several activist groups founded by Russian Social-Democrats (p 437).

Having established Lenin as a strong partisan of the German SPD, Lih goes on to examine Iskra (The Spark), the newspaper particularly associated with him, which ran from 1900 to 1905. Later sections deal with Iskra’s main rivals, Rabochaia Mysl (Workers’ Thought) and Rabochee Dyelo (The Workers’ Cause); these help us to understand the roots of Lenin’s disagreements with the line of these publications. Lih adds further background on other dramatis personae (characters in the play) such as the signatories of the ‘Joint Letter’ of September 1901 criticising Iskra, plus the enigmat-ic individuals Boris Savinkov and ‘Nadezhdin’ (EO Zelenski). There is also a very useful section on Pyotr Tkachev (1844-1885), whom some have cast as Lenin’s evil Russian mentor. Lih shows that, while Lenin had a favourable opinion of some aspects of Tkachev’s political record, Tkachev was not for him the inspirational figure these authors claim.

After introducing us to the chief actors in the Russian Social-Democratic drama, Lih then launches on an analysis of the concrete situation facing the Russian working-class movement in 1902, the year of Lenin’s pamphlet’s publica-tion. As regards the exposition of the pamphlet’s message and the unravelling of the tangle of misconceptions envel-oping it, this is possibly the most important part of the book.

The fundamental background fact here is that the Rus-sian workers are on the move: Lenin is quite sure, as a re-sult, that the workers will be receptive to the Social-Democratic message, if only the Social-Democrats concen-trate on disseminating it and refuse to be side-tracked by siren voices advocating ‘economism’, terrorism or whatever. If we latch onto this aspect of the situation then we can begin to make sense of what Lenin is arguing for in What Is To Be Done?. Lih claims — with justification it would seem — that the journal Iskra, and Lenin in his pamphlet, showed that they understood the problems and desires of Social-Democrat activists on the ground, winning support on that basis (pp 440-41). Lih states:

I have outlined an emerging consensus on the basic norms of the Russian underground. Those include centralism, discipline, opposition to artisanal limita-tions, opposition to conspiratorial organisations without links to the worker milieu, the need for rev-olutionaries by trade [that is, full-time activists], at least some division of labour, konspiratsiia [that is, the art of not getting arrested], inapplicability of formal electoral principles in the underground. These norms were the sensible and empirically worked-out implications of the original project of applying the SPD model to the extent that Russian autocratic conditions permitted. Ultimately, they derived from a common commitment to the merger of socialism and the worker movement. In WITBD Lenin describes the ideal organisation that would re-sult if all these norms were fully realised. The actual underground never remotely approached this ideal state. Nevertheless, the norms that Lenin picked up from the Russian Social-Democratic praktiki [activists] and trumpeted back to them and to all other social-ist activists were vital to the survival and to the ac-

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complishments — not lightly to be dismissed — of the Russian underground of 1890-1917. (p 488)

Lih has another very useful chapter on the split in the Rus-sian Social-Democratic ranks that took place at the Second Party Congress in 1903, which gave birth to the ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Menshevik’ factions. This is relevant because what he (accurately) calls the ‘textbook interpretation’ of What Is To Be Done? states that this pamphlet is the charter document where Lenin sets out his case for a super-centralist van-guard party, an initiative which drew sharp criticism from Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Rosa and Lev Da-vidovich were right on the ball, according to this version, given that ‘Leninism’ subsequently gave rise to Stalinism. A significant step along this road was Lenin’s move to get the congress to adopt a ‘restrictive definition’ of party member-ship (p 489), a move which precipitated the split and the subsequent diatribes of Luxemburg and Trotsky. But this story is not history, but legend.

For one thing, the question of Iskra, its future editors and its relation to the Congress as the sovereign body of the party, was a much more serious bone of contention than the question of the definition of a party member. Lenin and Plekhanov thought Congress should have the right to pick the new editorial board, and proposed themselves and Mar-tov as editors; Martov, Akselrod, Potresov and Vera Zasu-lich thought all six serving editors should continue in post. Lenin and Plekhanov won the vote, with the result that Martov refused to serve on the new board and the other three (plus Trotsky and some others) refused cooperation with it. For three months Plekhanov and Lenin edited the paper, but then Plekhanov proposed that the other former editors be coopted back. Lenin’s agreement was necessary for this, but Lenin thought that enough concessions had already been given, viz, ‘offering them space in Iskra to state their objections or even providing them with their own newspaper’ (pp 496-7), and dug his heels in. Lenin was then pressured into resigning, whereupon Plekhanov invit-ed the rest back onto the board. Lenin hit back by reissuing a 1902 article of his entitled ‘Letter to a Comrade on Organ-isational Questions’, accompanied by a postscript attacking a piece by Akselrod published in Iskra nos 55 and 57 — these issues appeared in the post-Congress period — and a second pamphlet headed One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Lih details the consequences of all this:

Lenin’s two broadsides absolutely infuriated his for-mer colleagues. Their impact was overwhelmingly more important than WITBD in defining the context and tone of the Menshevik case. The Menshevik

writers were personally angry at Lenin, not only for portraying them as opportunists, but, more funda-mentally, for undermining the legitimacy of the par-ty leadership at a time when the party needed to be even more united in the face of new challenges. Len-in seemed to them to be devoting all his energy to wrecking the party he had helped to build up.

So, in response, they organised a vast literary an-ti-Lenin campaign. One front consisted of their own long and obsessive Iskra articles attacking Lenin’s ‘Letter’ and especially One Step Forward. A second front called in heavy artillery from the West: pres-tigious party authorities such as Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, who were persuaded to weigh in with Iskra articles attacking Lenin. A third front was Trotsky’s extensive pamphlet Our Political Tasks, published in the summer of 1904 with the official imprimatur of the Iskra editorial board. (p 498)

My personal view is that in the remainder of the book Lih does enough to establish the truth of his case. As a result What Is To Be Done? turns into a much more interesting — and much more intelligible — work. Lenin Rediscovered sets the record straight and clears up several mysteries in the process. Particularly useful are Lih’s observations on the translation difficulties caused by certain terms used by the participants in the debates — especially ‘stikhiinost’, which Lih shows should not be translated as ‘spontaneity’. It would take too long to detail all of these problems, but it must be said that Lih’s scrupulousness in this department is particularly to be welcomed, as the use of an inappropriate word in a translation can easily give a totally false idea of what the author means. Lih, indeed, has taken the trouble to append his own translation of the work, which is a good idea.

But, to return to my initial contention, the chief merit of the book is to reinstate the German SPD as Lenin’s mod-el. Lenin had good reason to look in this direction for a model, and we should do the same, without being starry-eyed about it. To his credit, Lih is aware of certain criti-cisms that can be made of the SPD, even in its ‘heroic peri-od’, as his references to Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties (Macmillan, 1902) and Robert Michels’ Political Parties (Free Press, New York, 1962; originally published 1911) show. Lenin Rediscovered is of inestimable value in helping us to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the socialist tradition in Ger-many and Russia and in enabling us to decide what we should make use of and what not. Chris Gray

Letters

I’m Not ‘Pro-Soviet’

Dear Editor A review of a book, Against the Cold War: The History and

Political Tradition of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party 1945-89, by Darren G Lilliker, which appears in New Interven-tions, Volume 12, no 4, over the name of Cheney Longville, lists me as a pro-Soviet MP. I would be happy to be described as a


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Labour Party left-winger or a Marxist humanist, but to catego-rise me as ‘pro-Soviet’ misrepresents my position.

The Socialist Review Group (now the Socialist Workers Party), to which I belonged during 1952-59, had a slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Social-ism’, which more accurately describes my politics. I was always a critic of Soviet policies which did not accord with democratic socialist principles. I opposed the Soviet inter-vention in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I constantly made protests against Soviet abuses of human rights and, as Chairman of Liberation (formerly the Move-ment for Colonial Freedom), I went to the Soviet Embassy to express opposition to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

I was, however, a continual critic of Western imperial-ism — British, French, Portuguese and, of course, Ameri-can, etc — and this inevitably meant I supported move-ments which received aid from the Soviet Union or Cuba. I do not for one moment apologise for this. I am proud that I supported Vietnam against the American military on-slaught; that I supported Cuba against the Bay of Pigs inva-sion and the US embargo; that I supported Angola’s strug-gle for liberation, aided by the Cubans, etc, etc.

The reason I took an interest in Romania under Ceauşescu and wrote about him is not that he was pro-Soviet but because he opposed key Soviet policies. He reha-bilitated Romanian Communists who had been condemned and executed before he came to power. He opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and pledged support for Alexander Dubček. He rejected the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ of the Socialist Commonwealth which justified intervention in the affairs of other People’s Democracies and he supported the creation of nuclear-free zones in the Balkans and else-where. I had no illusions about the character of the regime and, unlike those who attack me for my contacts, I raised objections on human rights and the treatment of national minorities directly. However, I was concerned to seek to break down the polarisation between NATO and the War-saw Pact — which, I believed, should both be wound up. I moved a resolution on this which was carried at the 1985 Annual Conference of the Labour Party. I have no intention of apologising for any of this, least of all to people interest-ed only in smears.

In the course of my work, I was continually meeting representatives of Warsaw Pact countries, NATO countries, and non-aligned countries. How does this make me pro-Soviet or pro-NATO?

I never agreed with colleagues who regarded the Soviet Union as the earthly paradise, but I was glad to be associat-ed with them when we were pushing for socialist policies together. At least they did not support the US bombing of Vietnam, for example, unlike other colleagues in the La-bour Party who did.

Being on the left in the British Labour Party — as I still am — I was bound to be attacked by the right as pro-Soviet, despite the fact that on issues on which I did not automati-cally follow the ‘politically correct’ left-wing line, for exam-ple, supporting British membership of the EU, I was at-tacked from the left.

I remain content to have been my own man, making my own judgements as a democratic socialist regardless of hos-tile criticism from any quarter. I would claim that I never sold out on my socialist principles. Stan Newens

The Individual and History

Dear Editors I am grateful to Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criti-cism, Methuen, London, 1976) for providing a useful quota-tion on the basis of which to comment on Harry Ratner’s article (New Interventions, Volume 12, no 4). Eagleton treats literature (properly) as part of the superstructure, but ar-gues (also properly) that ‘it is not merely the passive reflec-tion of the economic base’. In support of this statement he cites Engels, in a letter to Joseph Bloch in 1890:

According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If there-fore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and ab-surd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — politi-cal forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class af-ter a successful battle, etc — forms of law — and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their fur-ther development into systems of dogma — also ex-ercise their influence upon the course of the histori-cal struggles and in many cases preponderate in de-termining their form.

(I don’t own a copy of the relevant volume of Marx–Engels Collected Works so cannot provide the reference.)

So, as Cyril Smith and Ken Tarbuck (both important contributors to this magazine in earlier years) have pointed out in their different ways, it is important to ascertain what Marx and Engels actually said before foisting upon them the accumulated dross of ‘Marxism’ — which has yet to be excavated from the cancerous transformations worked up-on it by Stalinists and academics.

If the mechanical deterministic approach is not what Marx and Engels ever taught, there are certainly those who found it convenient at least for polemical purposes. Here, for example, is one of the CPGB’s ‘intellectuals’, John Stra-chey:

Contemporary writers are a part of existing civilisa-tion; existing civilisation is a bourgeois civilisation; and bourgeois civilisation is in headlong decline. This fully [my emphasis] accounts for the peculiar characteristics which we notice in its greatest writ-ers. When we call these writers bourgeois, we are, of course, very far from suggesting that they are con-scious propagandists for the capitalists. On the con-trary, these writers do not think of capitalism or the bourgeoisie at all. They are too much part of capital-ism for that. They are so entirely within the bour-geoisie that they cannot even for a second get out-side and look back at the system or the class as a whole. They reflect the characteristics of their epoch automatically, unconsciously and therefore with perfect fidelity. (Literature and Dialectical Material-ism, New York, 1934)


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‘These writers’ refers to Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Poe, Emer-son, Mark Twain and Thomas Mann. If the quotation sounds preposterous, it is really because we are now vividly aware of what resulted from translating that kind of think-ing into artistic policy in the Stalinist states. JJ Plant

A New Tendency/Initiative

Dear Editors On 17 January 2009, a meeting of ex-members of the Cam-paign for a Marxist Party agreed the following statement from AGM resolutions which were amended and composit-ed.

The world struggle for democracy, taking place in a combined and uneven way in different countries across the world, culminates in the replacement of global capitalism with world communism. This struggle can only be conduct-ed successfully by the international working class whose advanced section organises itself into a world party which combines the revolutionary struggle for democracy with the aim of communism.

We recognise the unfortunate tendency for communists to identify themselves with the names of their favourite dead leaders, for example as Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists, etc. We agree to encourage the use of the term ‘international revolutionary democratic com-munism’ as the most scientific summary of the essential class politics of the working class. Critical assessment can and should be made of the contributions that leading theo-retical and practical activists, beginning with Marx and Engels, have made to international revolutionary democrat-ic communism.

This meeting recognises that during the last 20 years of globalisation, two billion people have joined the world working class. Despite this growth in the numerical size of the working class, this has not translated itself into the formation of a politically-conscious international class. The world’s working class can only become politically self-conscious of its position as a world class through the for-mation of its advanced section into an international party.

Today the crisis of global capitalism puts the task of forming an international political class as a priority for communists. Recognising the crimes of Soviet Stalinism and the failure and disintegration of world Trotskyism, the communist movement must form a new party — the inter-national revolutionary democratic communist party.

As a step towards this aim we call for the formation of a revolutionary democratic communist tendency/initiative. A provisional committee has been set up to begin making the necessary preparations. We can be contacted via the follow-ing e-mail address: [email protected]. Steve Freeman Moshé Machover Dave C Spencer

Stop Political Terror in Russia!

Dear Editors On 19 January 2009, our comrade Stanislav Markelov, a fighter for human rights, and the young anti-fascist journal-ist Anastasia Baburova were assassinated in the centre of Moscow. Stanislav Markelov, 34, defended the interests of victims of the Russian government’s policy in Chechnya, anti-fascists, activists of independent trade unions and so-cial movements. As a convinced democrat and socialist, he participated in various campaigns for justice and freedom in Russia and internationally.

The murder of Markelov and Baburova is definitely an act of political terror. Most probably, responsibility for this crime belongs to ultra-right gangsters, whose activity is growing in Russia every day. Attacks on ‘non-white’ people on the streets of Moscow and other cities have become commonplace, and several prominent anti-fascists were killed recently. Other victims of political terrorism are oppositional journalists, prin-cipled critics of the existing Russian political regime — Anna Politkovskaya, Magomed Yevloyev, Mikhail Beketov…

The growth of pro-fascist forces in Russia is objectively encouraged by the whole political atmosphere in the coun-try. While acts of political terrorism mostly go unpunished, the authorities and their mass media are engaged in hysterical propaganda of ‘patriotism’, authoritarianism, great-power sen-timents, and hostility towards external and internal ‘enemies’. Under such conditions, criminals against humanity (both of present and past) are painted as ‘heroes’ and those struggling against them as ‘traitors’. The last article by Markelov, ‘Patriot-ism as Diagnosis’, was devoted precisely to denouncing these awful ideas. And one hour before his assassination, Stanislav spoke at the press conference protesting against pre-term re-lease from prison of the war criminal Colonel Budanov, who raped and killed a Chechen woman. Stanislav was a legal representative of her relatives, he received many threats from supporters of the ‘heroic officer’ Budanov — and was killed a few days after the latter’s release…

The release of Budanov and the murder of Markelov are certainly linked, even if not directly: both characterise the real situation in Russia today.

Though now the world’s civil society can’t stop the po-litical terrorism in Russia by its own forces, it could be able to exert pressure on Russian authorities by showing that their passive or even objectively encouraging attitude to-wards escalating fascist violence ruins the international ‘image’ of the Russian state, finally discrediting it in the eyes of the global public opinion.

Therefore, we ask all socialists, democrats and libertari-ans to send letters to Russian Embassies in your countries, expressing indignation about political terrorism in Russia, demanding thorough investigation of murder of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova and punishment of its organisers. Praxis Research and Educational Centre, Moscow

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