Above: the final scene of the greatest Western of them all
I’ve always had great respect for the late Eric Hobsbawm as a historian, but less for his politics. I’ve warmed to the old Stalinist/Euro, though, having read that his last book, ‘Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century’ deals with (amongst other things), cowboys and the Western in literature, mythology and film. Here’s a little taste:
It is clear that many white protagonists of the original wild west epic are in some sense misfits in, or refugees from, “civilisation”, but that is not, I think, the main essence of their situation. Basically they are of two types: explorers or visitors seeking something that cannot be found elsewhere – and money is the very last thing they seek; and men who have established a symbiosis with nature, as it exists in its human and non-human shape, in these wilds.
In terms of literary pedigree, the invented cowboy was a late romantic creation. But in terms of social content, he had a double function: he represented the ideal of individualist freedom pushed into a sort of inescapable jail by the closing of the frontier and the coming of the big corporations. As a reviewer said of Frederic Remington’s articles, illustrated by himself in 1895, the cowboy roamed “where the American may still revel in the great red-shirted freedom which has been pushed so far to the mountain wall that it threatens soon to expire somewhere near the top”. In hindsight, the west could seem thus, as it seemed to that sentimentalist and first great star of movie westernsWilliam S Hart, for whom the cattle and mining frontier “to this country … means the very essence of national life … It is but a generation or so since virtually all this country was frontier. Consequently its spirit is bound up in American citizenship.” As a quantitative statement this is absurd, but its significance is symbolic. And the invented tradition of the west is entirely symbolic, inasmuch as it generalises the experience of a comparative handful of marginal people. Who, after all, cares that the total number of deaths by gunshot in all the major cattle towns put together between 1870 and 1885 – in Wichita plus Abilene plus Dodge City plus Ellsworth – was 45, or an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season, or that local western newspapers were not filled with stories about bar-room fights, but about property values and business opportunities?
John Wayne in The Searchers. Photograph: AP Photo/Warner Bros
But the cowboy also represented a more dangerous ideal: the defence of the native Waspish American ways against the millions of encroaching immigrants from lower races. Hence the quiet dropping of the Mexican, Indian and black elements, which still appear in the original non-ideological westerns – for instance, Buffalo Bill’s show. It is at this stage and in this manner that the cowboy becomes the lanky, tall Aryan. In other words, the invented cowboy tradition is part of the rise of both segregation and anti-immigrant racism; this is a dangerous heritage. The Aryan cowboy is not, of course, entirely mythical. Probably the percentage of Mexicans, Indians and black people did diminish as the wild west ceased to be essentially a south-western, even a Texan, phenomenon, and at the peak of the boom it extended into areas like Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. In the later periods of the cattle boom the cowboys were also joined by a fair number of European dudes, mainly Englishmen, with eastern-bred college-men following them.
As the white smoke rises from the Sistine Chapel and Pope Francis emerges into the public gaze, now seems a good time to draw readers’ attention to David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, one of the wittiest and most intelligent novels ever written about Catholics and Catholicism. Although published in 1981, it’s set in the 1960′s, when the Church was riven by a simmering dispute between traditionalists and modernisers, with the question of sex at the heart of the crisis. For a while the modernisers seemed to in the ascendant, only to have their hopes dashed. Sounds familiar?
Here’s an excerpt:
In the early nineteen-sixties, however, [the modernisers'] main hope was that the official Church would change its mind on birth control; that they would wake up one morning and read in the papers that the Pope had said it was all right for them to use contraceptives after all. What a rush there would have been to the chemists’ and barbers’ shops, and the Family Planning Clinics! In hindsight it is claer that this was a fairly preposterous expectation, for such a reversal of traditional teaching would have dealt a blow to the credibility of papal authority so shattering that no Pope, not even Pope John, could reasonably have been expected to perpetrate it. Miriam [one of the group of young Catholic friends in the novel] was right: instead of waiting for the Pope to contradict his predecessors, they should have made up their own minds. This in fact they did, in due course, but it took a lot of misery and stress to screw them up to the point of disobedience. In the early nineteen-sixties they were still hoping for a change of heart at the top, at least in favour of the Pill, to which, some progressive theologians claimed, the traditional natural law arguments against artificial contraception did not apply.
In other respects the Church undoubtably was changing. Ope John, against all expectations (CARETAKER PONTIFF ELECTED, Angela and Dennis had read on newspaper placards when they returned from their honeymoon) had electrified the Catholic world by the radical style of his pontificate. “We are going,” he declared, “to shake of the dust that has collected on the throne of St Peter since the time of Constatine and let in some fresh air.” The Second Vatican Council which he convened brought out into the the light a thousand unsuspected shoots of innovation and experiment, in theology, liturgy and pastoral practice, that had been buried for decades out of timidity or misplaced loyalty. In 1962, Pope John actually set up a Pontifical Commission to study problems connected with the Family, Population and Birth Control. This was encouraging news in one sense, since it seemed to admit the possibility of change, but disappointing in that it effectively removed the issue from debate at the Vatican Council, which began its deliberations in the same year. Pope John died in 1963, to be succeeded by Pope Paul VI, who enlarged the Commission and instructed its members specifically to examine the Church’s traditional teaching with particular reference to the progesterone pill. Catholics, especially young married ones, waited impatiently for the result of this inquiry.
Meanwhile, other changes proceeded at a dizzying pace. The mass was revised and translated into the vernacular. The priest now faced the congregation across a plain table-style altar, which made the origins of the Mass in the Last Supper more comprehensible, and allowed more of the laity to see for the first time what the celebrant actually did. All masses were now dialogue masses, the whole congregation joining in the responses. The Eucharistic fast was reduced to a ngligible one hour, before which any kind of food and drink might be consumed, and the laity were urged to receive communion a every mass — a practice previously deemed appropriate only to people of great personal holiness and entailing frequent confession. Typical devotions of Counter-Reformation Catholicism such as Benediction and the Stations of the Cross dwindled in popularity. Rosaries gathered dust at the backs of drawers. The liturgy of Holy Week, previously of a length and tedium only to be bourne by the most devout, was streamlined, reconstructed, vernacularized, and offensive references to the “perfidious Jews” were removed from the prayers on Good Friday. Ecumenism, the active pursuit of Christian Unity through “dialogue” with other Churches, became a recommended activity. The change of posture from the days when the Catholic Church had seen itself as essentially in competition with other, upstart Christian denominations, and set their total sumission to its own authority as the price of unity, was astomishingly swift. Adrian,looking through his combative apologetics textbooks from Catholic Evidence Guild days, before sending them off to a parish jumble sale, could hardly believe how swift it has been. And from the Continent, from Latin America, through the religious press, came rumours of still more startling innovations being mooted — married priests, even women priests, Communion in the hand and under both kinds, inter-communion with other denominations. “Liberation Theology”, and “Catholic Marxism”. A group of young intellectuals of the latter persuasion, based in Cambridge, founded a journal called Slant in which they provocatively identified the Kingdom of God heralded in the New Testament with the Revolution, and charcterized the service of Benediction as a capitalist-imperialist liturgical perversion which turned the shared bread of the authentic Eucharist into a reified commodity.
These developments were not, of course, universally welcomed.
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963):
A Life
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
Interesting news for fans of Victor Serge, the Franco-Russian novelist
and revolutionary (1890-1947).
• In Mexico, a trove of Serge’s Notebooks has recently come to light
and are now published in France, beautifully edited, by Agone in
Marseille, 65 years after Serge’s death.
• Meanwhile, in the US, the first complete English translation of
Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1905-1941 was published last year
by NY Review of Books Classics. Peter Sedgwick’s original translation,
cut by 1/8 in the 1963 Oxford edition from which all others were
copied, has now been restored by George Paisis. In addition to
Sedgwick’s Introduction and a Foreword by Adam Hochschild, the NYRB
Classics edition includes a Glossary, which I prepared to help readers
cope with all those Russian names. Unfortunately, my Postface, “Victor
Serge’s Political Testament” was omitted by mistake. I attach it
below.
• Finally, for those who live in the NY area, I will be hosting a
class on Serge at the Brecht Forum this Spring and Fall, starting with
public lectures on Feb. 2 and 9 co-sponsored by NYRB Classics and
Haymarket Books.
Victor Serge’s Political Testament
‘What would Victor Serge’s political position be if he were alive
today ?’ During the 60-odd years since Serge’s untimely death, this
question – a priori unanswerable — has been asked (and answered) many
times — on occasion, as we shall see, by self-interested politicos
and pundits. The consensus among these postmortem prophets is that
this hypothetical posthumous Serge would have moved Right, along with
ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler and the ‘N.Y. Intellectuals’ around
the Partisan Review. It is of course, impossible to prove otherwise,
but the fact remains that throughout the Cold War neither the
CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom nor any other conservative
anti-Communist group ever attempted to exploit Serge’s writings, which
continued to speak far too revolutionary a language and remained
largely out of print. Nonetheless, the spectre of an undead Right-wing
Serge continues to haunt the critics, and there are reasons why.
To begin with, in January 1948, a month after Serge’s death, that
great confabulator André Malraux launched macabre press campaign
claiming Serge as a death-bed convert to Gaullism. The sad fact is
that six days before he died, Serge had sent a grossly flattering
personal letter to Malraux, begging the support of de Gaulle’s once
and future Minister of Culture (and Gallimard editor) to publish his
novel Les Derniers temps in France. Desperate to leave the political
isolation and (fatally) unhealthy altitude of Mexico for Paris, Serge
indulged in an uncharacteristic ruse de guerre, feigning sympathy for
Malraux’s ‘political position’ — according to Vlady, at his urging.
Serge’s ruse backfired. His letter and the news of his death reached
Paris simultaneously, and Malraux seized the moment by printing
selected excerpts and leaking them to C.L. Sulzberger, who published
them in the N.Y. Times — thus recruiting Serge’s fresh corpse into
the ranks of the Western anti-Communist crusade.
Aside from this letter, there is zero evidence in Serge’s writings,
published and unpublished, of sympathy for Gaullism or Western
anti-Communism — quite the contrary. In 1946, Serge sharply
criticized his comrade René Lefeuvre, editor of the far-left review
Masses, for publishing an attack on the USSR by an American
anti-Communist: «If the Soviet regime is to be criticised, » wrote
Serge, « let it be from a socialist and working class point of view.
If we must let American voices be heard, let them be those of sincere
democrats and friends of peace, and not chauvinistic demagogues; let
them be those of the workers who will succeed one day, we hope, in
organising themselves into an independent party. » A few months later,
Serge followed up : « I understand that the Stalinist danger alarms
you. But it must not make us lose sight of our overall view. We must
not play into the hands of an anti-Communist bloc […] We shall get
nowhere if we seem more preoccupied with criticising Stalinism than
with defending the working class. The reactionary danger is still
there, and in practice we shall often have to act alongside the
Communists. »
To complicate matters even further, in the course of a fraternal
discussion with Leon Trotsky over Kronstadt and the Cheka in 1938, the
‘Old Man’ unjustly (on the basis of an article he hadn’t read),
portrayed Serge as abandoning Marxism along with Stalinism and
drifting to the Right. Nonetheless Serge, despite political
differences of which the reader of these Memoirs is aware, continued
to defend Trotsky to his death, helped expose Trotsky’s murderer, and
collaborated with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, on The Life and
Death of Leon Trotsky. Yet generations of Trotskyists have reflexively
handed down Trotsky’s caricature of Serge as a ‘bridge from revolution
to reaction’ — an accusation apparently confirmed by the ‘Gaullism’
charge.
More recently Serge’s posthumous rightward drift has been alleged on
the basis of his guilt-by-association with erstwhile U.S. leftists and
socialists who subsequently moved Right. (Of course Serge’s main
political associations were in Europe, a fact this argument ignores).
One recalls that in Mexico Serge lived by his pen (like Marx in exile
who wrote for Greeley’s N.Y. Herald Tribune) writing news articles in
English for the Social-Democratic press (the staunchly anti-Communist
Call and New Leader) as well as think-pieces for the Partisan Review
(whose editors had supported his struggles to survive in Vichy France
and Mexico). Many of these ‘N.Y. Intellectuals’ did indeed move
rightward, beginning with James Burnham in the 1940s. Thus Serge, it
is argued, ‘would have’ moved Right too. Yet, not long before he died,
Serge vigorously attacked Burnham, writing: “The paradox that he has
developed, doubtless out of love for a provocative theory, is as false
as it is dangerous. Under a thousand insipid forms it is to be found
in the Press and the literature of this age of preparation for the
Third World War. The reactionaries have an obvious interest in
confounding Stalinist totalitarianism – exterminator of the
Bolsheviks – with Bolshevism itself; their aim is to strake at the
working class, at Socialism, at Marxism, even at Liberalism…”
All this would be just a sad footnote were it not that the posthumous
image of a right-wing Serge, based on the old ‘Gaullism’ and ‘NY
Intellectualism’ arguments, was still being agitated as late as 2010.
To lay this ghost once and for all, let us quote Serge’s last
significant political statement, generally considered his ‘political
testament.’
‘Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution’ was dated August 1947 and
published in Paris by La Révolution proletarianne in November 1947,
the month of his death. There Serge writes: “A feeble logic —
pointing an accusing finger at the dark spectacle of the Stalinist
Soviet Union — deduces from this the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, hence
that of Marxism, hence that of Socialism […] Aren’t you forgetting the
other bankruptcies? Where was Christianity during the recent social
catastrophes? What happened to Liberalism? What did Conservatism –
enlightened or reactionary– produce? Did it not give us Mussolini,
Hitler, Salazar, and Franco? If it was a question of honestly weighing
the many failures of different ideologies, we would have our work cut
out for us for a long time. And it is far from over …”
As far as capitalism is concerned, Serge concluded: “There is no
longer any doubt that the era of stable, growing, relatively pacific
capitalism came to an end with the First World War. The Marxist
revolutionaries who announced the opening of a global revolutionary
era—and said that if socialism did not establish itself in at least
the great European powers, another period of barbarism and a “cycle of
wars of war and revolution” (as Lenin put it, quoting Engels) would
follow — were right. The conservatives, the evolutionists, and the
reformists who chose to believe in the future bourgeois Europe
carefully cut into pieces at Versailles, then replastered at Locarno,
and fed with phrases dug up at the League of Nations — are today
remembered as statesmen of blind policies….
The Marxist revolutionaries of the Bolshevik school awaited and worked
toward the social transformation of Europe and the world by an
awakening of the working masses and by the rational and equitable
reorganization of a new society. They expected to continue working
toward the time when men would take control over their own destinies.
There they made a mistake — they were beaten. Instead, the
transformation of the world is taking place amidst a terrible
confusion of institutions, movements and beliefs without the hoped-for
clarity of vision, without a sense of renewed humanism, and in a way
that now imperils all the values and hopes of men. Nevertheless the
general trends are still those defined by the socialists of 1917–20
toward the collectivization and the planification of economies, the
internationalization of the world, the emancipation of oppressed and
colonized peoples, and the formation of mass-based democracies of a
new kind. The alternative was also foreseen by the socialists:
barbarism and war, war and barbarism — a monster with two heads.
As Peter Sedgwick put it in 1963: ‘Whatever else they may be, these
are not the words of a man of the Right, or of any variety of
ex-revolutionary penitent.’
Today is ‘Orwell Day’, the 63rd anniversary of the author’s death (additionally, he was born 110 years ago this June 25th) . To mark the occasion (even though ‘Orwell Day’ seems to be largely a stunt by Penguin Books), we publish below a ten year-old article from the AWL’s paper Solidarity. It was written just as the SWP was cosying up to George Galloway (then still – just – a Labour MP), and had discovered the supposedly “progressive” nature of Islamism. The dreadful abomination that would be ‘Respect’ was about to come into being…
Author: Sean Matgamna
“Revolutionary ardour in the struggle for socialism is inseparable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truth”.
Leon Trotsky, “Trotskyism and the PSOP”
“There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late”.
George Orwell, Looking Back On The Spanish War, 1942
The centenary of George Orwell’s birth is being widely celebrated in the bourgeois media. To these professional liars, Orwell, the man who told awkward and untimely truths, is a hero!
Apart from a few unteachable pickled-in-the-lies old Stalinists, most people who think of themselves as being of the left, for example the Socialist Workers Party, also see Orwell as a hero.
It wasn’t always so. When he was alive, Orwell, who died in 1950, was regarded by the dominant forces ‘on the left’ of the 1930s and 40s as a “right-winger”, a crank, an “anti-Soviet renegade”, an agent or a “dupe” of fascism, and an all-round enemy.
The only exceptions in Britain then were those whose ideas were informed by Trotsky’s writings on Stalinist Russia, the Stalinist “Communist” International, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, and other related questions.
Numerically those were few. The largest group was the declining Independent Labour Party, which Orwell joined in the mid-1930s. Then there were the organised Trotskyists, in the 1930s a handful of them. Their maximum number, in the mid 1940s, was never more than about 400.
The Trotskyists were shunned, hounded, persecuted, and where possible suppressed by the “left” of that time. They were the targets of the approach advocated in, for example, a witch-hunting wartime pamphlet of the Communist Party (the CPGB) entitled “Clear Out Hitler’s Agents”. Its message was: “Treat a Trotskyist as you would a fascist”.
Orwell was regarded as an enemy of “the left” because he shared some of the Trotskyists’ ideas. Orwell, like the Trotskyists, did not believe that an honest and serious person could be guided in politics, or in his attitude to the conventional left, by WB Yeats’ injunction: “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams”.
Socialists “dream” about a world transformed. We do not spin consoling dreams about the world we live in. If we cannot bear to define that world as it actually is, then we will never manage to transform it. Our “socialism” will for us be only a consoling quasi-religion.
Orwell, like the Trotskyists, trampled with large hobnailed boots on the self-poisoning fantasies, dreams and sacred myths of that left.
On Spain, for example.
In July 1936 the fascist-minded generals revolted against the newly-elected Popular Front government, unleashing a terrible civil war. Spain became the great cause of the “anti-fascist” left, as indeed it should.
But the very “anti-fascist” Stalinist movement was wholly controlled and in part financed from Moscow by people whose main concern was to convince the Paris and London governments that their “communism” posed no threat to capitalism, and that they could control the working class for them, and, “for a consideration,” would. They wanted imperialist allies against Hitler’s Germany. These “anti-fascists” suppressed the workers who had seized power in Catalonia and set up a Stalinist-bourgeois police state in the anti-fascist Republican areas.
They, not the fascist armies which by March 1939 controlled all of Spain, suppressed the revolutionary Spanish labour movement.
Throughout the world, the Stalinist press, and most of the socialist and liberal press, which at that point saw the Stalinists as allies against fascism, suppressed news of what was actually happening in the real Spain.
They substituted heroic half-truths and myths about the “anti-fascist struggle” there. To do anything else, the “knowing” people said, would be to “undermine the anti-fascist fight” and “play into the hands of” the Spanish fascists and, ultimately, of Hitler.
You had to take sides and respect and defend the official truths of your “side”. You had to accept an entirely negative definition of what was “anti-fascist” and therefore “working-class”, “progressive”, “left”. You could not afford to concern yourself much with what the “anti-fascists”, whether bourgeois liberals or totalitarianising Stalinists, positively were, in their own right and what they were actually doing.
This was the time of the Popular Fronts, when the Communist Parties sought allies on the right. The Stalinists set the pace and tone here, and their social-democratic and liberal fellow-travellers acted as outriders and enforcers for them. Trotsky called these Stalinising “Liberals” “the priests of half-truth”.
In Britain, for example, the Liberal News Chronicle (which was twinned with a London evening paper, The Star) had fallen under Stalinist influence – its correspondent in Spain was Arthur Koestler, then a Stalinist – and seconded the lies of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. So did such Stalinist-influenced labour papers as the then very influential New Statesman, and Tribune, which at its start in 1937, was a Stalinist-Popular Front paper.
When Orwell, who went to Spain politically naive, came back disabused of illusions about the “official” left and tried to break the “left front” of lying in the cause of “anti-fascism”, he found he could not get the truth past the “anti-fascist” and leftist “priests of half-truth”.
These were days of the Left Book Club (LBC). Published by Victor Gollancz – under an editorial committee of Stalinists and pro-Stalinists – the LBC was churning out large editions of its orange-jacketed volumes. One measure of that time was that Fate of a Revolution, an account of the USSR by Victor Serge, the old communist who had been in the USSR until 1936, was published in Britain by a rather feeble competitor of the Left Book Club, the Right Book Club, which also published such honest eye-witness left-wing accounts of the USSR as the American journalist Eugene Lyons’ Assignment In Utopia.
Orwell described the situation like this:
“The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of Daily Mail reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle. The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan government) is far more afraid of the [working-class] revolution than of the fascists…
“The New Statesman, having previously refused an article of mine on the suppression of the POUM [quasi-Trotskyists, allied to the ILP] on the ground that it would ’cause trouble’, also refused to print the review as it ‘controverted editorial policy’, or in other words blew the gaff on the Communist Party… Whatever you do don’t believe a word you read in the News Chronicle or Daily Worker. The only daily paper I have seen in which a gleam of truth sometimes gets through is the [Daily] Express…”
It was the same with many things other than the Spanish Civil War. Orwell found himself like the “undersocialised” boy in Hans Andersen’s story who noticed that the Emperor, whose clothes everyone else wholeheartedly admired, was in fact naked.
Today we look back with respect and some gratitude to the Orwells and pioneer Trotskyists, and with contempt and revulsion on the broad “left” of that time. The untimely truths which Orwell and the Trotskyists told about Spain, the USSR, etc., are today commonplaces understood by most people who think of themselves as ‘left’.
In Orwell’s case, the pattern is not too far from what the Irish socialist-republican James Connolly wrote of the pioneer Republican Wolfe Tone on the centenary of the Republican rising of 1798 in which Tone lost his life: “Apostles of freedom are ever crucified when living, and idolised when safely dead”. Their once inconvenient ideas come to be “received” wisdom for the sort of people who most likely would, when they lived, have been among the persecutors of those ideas’ pioneers.
Orwell was made of less malleable stuff. He registered what he saw, thought about it honestly, and reported it accurately, believing with Karl Marx that the truth is a great revolutionary force.
Right now, the ideas of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty are unpopular with most of the left on many contemporary questions – for example, on the attitude socialists should take to a Labour MP who acted for many years as a political agent (paid or unpaid makes little difference) for the quasi-fascist dictatorship in Iraq – people who for decades did in Iraq what the fascists Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War did when they won that war. We are so much at odds with the conventional left that it is no exaggeration to say: if the SWP and its political satellites like the ISG, the CPGB, WP, etc are left, then we aren’t. And the other way around.
It would be foolish to claim that because our ideas are unpopular with the contemporary mainstream left, therefore they are correct. The opposite claim, however, can safely be made. Today, as in Orwell’s time, we have a mainstream pseudo-left that has lost its way. For most practical purposes, it is not a “left”, still less a Marxist “left”, at all.
It makes no difference that the ABCs of Trotsky’s politics, and not, as in the 1930s and 40s, of Stalin’s, form the received truths of our left. “Tradition” in politics is only as good as those who try to give it current relevance and life. And in fact in today’s “Trotskisant” but eclectic and incoherent left, much of the Stalinist politics against which Orwell and the Trotskyists fought in the 1930s has been revived.
Popular frontism, for example. But, above all, negativism in self-definition.
Not now “anti-fascism”, but “anti-imperialism”. Never mind what a given political current, or a given regime in a given country, is “in itself”. If it is in conflict with “imperialism”, or targeted by imperialism, then nothing else matters. It is in the “camp” of the left. It is in “our” camp; “on our side”. Let it be!
In this way ideas against which the Trotskyists in Trotsky’s time, and Orwell, counterposed independent working-class politics have again become dominant on the left. Today’s left is swamped and waterlogged with the politics and the prejudices that went into the making of 1930s’ Stalinism.
It is shrouded in the vapours given off by various “anti-imperialist” chauvinisms (Catholic-Irish national-chauvinism, anti-Jewish Arab and Muslim chauvinism, etc). Even narrow British nationalism: purely negative opposition to the British ruling class and its governments, saying no when they say yes and yes when they say no, has for 30 years and more made the British left into boneheaded “little Britishers” opposed to the unification of Europe.
Solidarity has devoted much space to the pro-Iraqi politics of many on the anti-war left. It was not enough for them to oppose Britain and the USA, as we did. To feel whole, they needed to embrace the quasi-fascist Iraqi regime and the reactionary Islamic opponents of Bush’s and Blair’s war, notably the Muslim Brotherhood (MAB). Thereby they crossed the line separating working class from populist, cross-class politics. Is there a precedent for this? Yes.
In 1938 Maurice Thorez, the leader of French Stalinism, offered to extend the hand of Popular Front friendship all the way to “patriotic fascists”-to French fascists who were not bought or hypnotised by Nazi Germany and would in the coming war defend France. He did not manage to realise such a Popular Front. During the recent anti-war movement, the major forces on the British left realised something very close to it. They established a Popular Front with the Islamic near-equivalent of Thorez’ “patriotic fascists”, the ultra-reactionary Muslim Brotherhood.
Like Orwell and the Trotskyists of the 1930s, Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty have been howled down and are shunned by ‘the left’ for our opposition to such practices. As well as outright hostility, we have met with incomprehension, from good-willed people who unknowingly let their attitudes and ideas here be shaped by pressure of the “norms” on these matters established by the dominant “left”.
For ourselves, we have great difficulty understanding how people who call themselves socialists can accept as a comrade someone who has, as a government minister put it in the House of Commons recently, acted as a “mouthpiece” for the quasi-fascist Iraqi regime, and who on his own admission was financed by Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and a Ba’thist businessman.
Orwell, and the Trotskyists of the 1930s and 40s, are better examples for serious socialists to follow than their equivalent of our conventional ‘left’.
He found the philistines, like the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, bowing down to the “left public opinion” created by the Stalinists and their fellow-travellers. He found himself trying to gain foot-room for the truth in the pestilential swamp of lies and corruption created by the Stalinists and those who, for their own reasons, tolerated them.
He was confronted by a world in which the Labour ‘leftists’ who let the Stalinists influence their thinking, like Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps, advocated an alliance of the working class with Liberals and “progressive Tories” in a Popular Front. As Trotsky pointed out, they were in real political terms to the right of Labour right-wingers like Herbert Morrison. The Labour right rejected the Popular Front and wanted a Labour government.
Just so today when the left gives credence to Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Iraqi workers and Kurds, allies with the MAB, the advocates of an authoritarian clerical regime in all Islamic countries, and sees no reason to distance itself politically from Saddam Hussein’s admirer George Galloway. This pseudo-left is in basic class terms to the right of decent-minded reformist. anti-conventional left, workers, including Islamic workers in Britain and elsewhere.
It would, as above, be foolish to claim that because our ideas are unpopular on the “left”, therefore they are right. But those who follow “left-wing” fashion, and don’t dare question the “left consensus” will almost certainly go wrong. That is the point about George Orwell and the Trotskyists of his time.
The root source of the corruption of the “left” in Orwell’s time was the Stalinist ruling class in Russia which presented itself as “communist” and argued that the defence of their interests was the proper first concern of workers all over the world. Siding with the Russian “workers’ state” exerted a malign, corrupting and disorienting influence on the left for many decades, including the Trotskyist left who “critically” “defended the Soviet Union”.
But the USSR is long gone, and those who are the most corrupted now, the SWP, were once distinguished by their refusal to have illusions in the USSR or to see themselves as in the USSR’s “camp”. They were proud to define themselves as “Third Campists”, people working to develop the “camp” of the working class and oppressed peoples against both the US and USSR-led “camps”.
Today we have the SWP purveying the sort of politics which the Stalinists, the quasi-Stalinists, and the worst of the kitsch Trotskyists once purveyed about the USSR “workers’ state”.
As with the “anti-fascist” degenerates of George Orwell’s time who forgot all about class politics and working-class self-interest, defining themselves only negatively by what they were against-fascism, and, fundamentally, German fascism-and could therefore ally even with French anti-German fascists, so with the “anti-imperialism” of today.
There is, however, an important difference, and it is not the 1930s Popular Frontists who come out worse in the comparison. The Stalinists in the 1930s believed that the USSR was evolving towards socialism and that, in the long run, all their dirty dealings, in the interests of the USSR – as defined by its rulers – would serve the cause of progress and socialism. They were defined negatively as “anti-fascists” in practical politics, but not only negatively. By serving the USSR they served socialism. Or so they thought.
The SWP believes no such thing about those in whose camp it has rushed to place itself in the last 15 years-the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran (against Iraq); Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war; Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal primitive Serbian imperialism in Kosova (1999); the Taliban in Afghanistan; the Muslim fundamentalists and Saddam Hussein in the recent war.
The left today is entirely negative. It has no “historical perspectives”, no idea of and seemingly no concern with historical progress, no belief that those like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic with whom it allies “against imperialism” can, if they survive, help the cause of humanity, of socialism or of the working class.
For a whole vast range of the world they are – to put it in the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto – “reactionary socialists”. They recoil against those forces in the world today-the capitalist bourgeois democracies-which are pushing forward the conditions out of struggle against which the working class can advance to socialism. They ally against them with regimes flatly reactionary both for their own peoples and for neighbouring peoples (Kosovars in the case of Milosevic, Kurds in the case of Saddam Hussein).
This is a left that has, in its blinkered negativism, turned the norms of socialist working-class politics inside out, back to front, upside down. No wonder it has stumbled into such long-discredited Stalinist patterns as Popular Frontism.
The example of Orwell, and of Trotsky and the Trotskyists of the 1930s and 40s, is therefore of great importance today to those who want the post-Stalinist left to go forward, not, as most of it has in Britain, to collapse in a heap on the poisoned ground of Stalinism. For ourselves we subscribe to and will continue to try to live up to Trotsky’s guiding principle: “Revolutionary ardour… is inescapable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truth.”
[This article was an Editorial in Solidarity in July 2003.]
Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in - Evelyn Waugh
Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites and some of them plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral - George Orwell
Wodehouse is back on TV (BBC 1, Sundays), in the form of the Blandings stories about Lord Emsworth, his fearsome sister Constance, the ambitious secretary Baxter and Emsworth’s prize sow, The Empress.
Those of you not already aux fait with the Wodehouse oeuvre will have gathered just from the above, that this is pretty lightweight stuff, completely devoid of any pretensions to social commentary or psychological insight. It’s pure entertainment and – more to the point – pure escapism.
Wodehouse’s published writings began in the very early years of the last century and continued right up to his death in 1974, when he left an unfinished manuscript that was published posthumously as Sunset at Blandings. But (as Orwell pointed out) the world of Wodehouse was outdated even by the 1920′s: Emsworth was a throwback to a bygone Edwardian age and Bertie Wooster really died in the corner of some foreign field round about 1915.
Wodehouse’s reputaton has by now just about about recovered from his appalling misjudgement when, living in France in 1941 and having been interned by advancing German forces, he agreed to broadcast some lighthearted “chats” on Nazi radio. These were apolitical in tone and content, but naturally laid him open to the charge (made most forcefully by ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror) that he’d been a willing tool of Goebbels’ and had agreed to broadcast in order to get himself released. George Orwell considered Wodehouse to have acted like a bloody idiot, but wrote an essay (In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse, February 1945) that strongly defended him against charges of treachery. It turns out that the British authorities reached the same conclusion, but decided not to tell him, and Wodehouse spent the rest of his days brooding in self-imposed exile in America.
When considering what was undoubtably a dreadful error on Wodehouse’s part, it is worth remembering that he was the creator of Sir Roderick Spode, a thoroughly unpleasant bully and demagogue who turns up in several of the Wooster stories, described as “founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a fascist organisation better known as the Blackshorts.” Not conclusive proof perhaps, but pretty persuasive evidence that Wodehouse had no love of fascism.
But why on earth would any person of even vaguely leftist inclinations actually enjoy these farcical tales of dotty aristocrats, domineering aunts and over-privileged wastrels?
The sheer escapism has a lot to do with it: I know that I am very far from being the only leftie who’s found solace at Blandings Castle and/or the Drones Club when life’s become difficult one way or another. Then there’s the sheer craftsmanship of his plots, and -especially – his use of language.
When Bertie Wooster describes “Aunt calling aunt calling to aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps” you know you’re in the hands of a writer of comic English to rank alongside Wilde and Dickens. Which, come to think of it, may be why BBC 1′s effort on Sunday was just slightly disappointing: the irreplacable descriptive and narrative voice of Wodehouse himself was missing.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales were first published on December 20th 1812. To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication the BBC ran a series on the tales which examined them from various angles – as expressions of nationalism and psychological states, feminist interpretations and so on. The tales have mutated in all sorts of ways – bowdlerised for children’s editions, cutified by Walt Disney, rewritten by Angela Carter.
When I was child I had a big format picture book of them which had been published in 1966. The tales still contained cruelty which would be thought unsuitable for children today e.g the wicked queen in Snow White being forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she was dead, Cinderella’s sisters cutting off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper and the wood-cutter opening up the wolf’s belly to rescue Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, then sowing it up again with stones. Also Rapunzel had twins before she was married.
My favourite story was, and is, The Youth Who could Not Shiver. The Youth in it has heard of people shivering with fear in graveyards and other creepy places, but has never felt it for himself. So he goes about the world saying continually “Oh, if I could but shiver”. People get him to sit under a gallows where seven hanged men are swinging, or to watch three nights in a heavily haunted castle. .
“When midnight came, a ringing and a rattling noise was heard, gentle at first and louder and louder by degrees; then there was a pause, and presently with a loud outcry half a man’s body came down the chimney and fell at his feet. “Holloa,” he exclaimed; “only half a man answered that ringing; that is too little.” Then the ringing began afresh, and a roaring and howling was heard, and the other half fell down. “Wait a bit,” said he; “I will poke up the fire first.”
When he had done so and looked round again, the two pieces had joined themselves together, and an ugly man was sitting in his place. “I did not bargain for that,” said the youth; “the bench is mine.” The man tried to push him away, but the youth would not let him, and giving him a violent push sat himself down in his old place. Presently more men fell down the chimney, one after the other, who brought nine thigh-bones and two skulls, which they set up, and then they began to play at ninepins.
At this the youth wished also to play, so he asked whether he might join them. “Yes, if you have money!” “Money enough,” he replied, “but your balls are not quite round”; so saying he took up the skulls, and, placing them on his lathe, turned them round.
“Ah, now you will roll well,” said he. “Holloa! now we will go at it merrily.” So he played with them and lost some of his money, but as it struck twelve everything disappeared. Then he lay down and went to sleep quietly.
On the morrow the King came for news, and asked him how he had fared this time. “I have been playing ninepins,” he replied, “and lost a couple of dollars.” “Have you not shivered?” “No! I have enjoyed myself very much; but I wish some one would teach me that!”‘
This tale is comic, and I do wish some film company would turn it into a spoof horror movie. The Youth is a really attractive figure, being so fearless and matter of fact when confronted by supernatural terrors. The ending is good too. The Youth wins the Princess, of course, but she and her chambermaid finally get him to shiver by natural instead of supernatural means.
However, I was put out to find out in the series that that the Nazis picked up Grimm’s tales for propaganda purposes e.g. by giving the wood-cutter in Red Riding Hood a Nazi armband. The Youth Who Could not Shiver was a Nazi favourite. Of course they missed the point of the story, which they turned into Nazi uplift.
“Paul Diehl’s 1935 adaptation of this story . . . was one of a range of silent short films made for the Reichstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (State Office for Educational Films) and widely shown in German schools. The scene of the night in the castle, though it follows Grimm closely in parts, shows clearly this altered ideological orientation. The youth, now given the name Hans, is swift and violent in his dispatch of a variety of grotesque creatures. He skewers one on a fork and holds it over a flame. He fastens a cat in a vice, cuts its head off, and tosses it into the moat. Unlike the written text, in which the youth feels sorry for a dead body and tries to warm it up, Diehl presents him as pitiless. Since the film has no sound-track, teachers could talk over it and impose an interpretation: children were taught that the action in the film symbolized the necessity for German fearlessness in stamping out enemies of the state (Jews, gays, Gypsies, non-Aryans). In 1937 the film was given a gold medal by the government department for which it was made. Nine years later, however, a Unesco commission, charged with the task of de-Nazifying the teachers and materials that were to be employed in post-war German schools, came to a different verdict: ‘Though there is nothing that is specifically subversive in this film, there is much that is typically Nazi in outlook, with its approbation of killing and force, coupled with callousness.’ The film was therefore suppressed, and is today little known, despite the technical proficiency of its animation.”
Among all their other barbarities, the Nazis had no sense of humour and no idea how to read.
The great jazz trombonist, arranger, composer and teacher Bob Brookmeyer died just over a year ago. As well as his musical accomplishments, he was a fine essayist, blogger and writer of what used to be called (back in the days of LPs) sleeve- (or liner-) notes. Someone really ought to publish a collection of his writings. In the meanwhile, here’re the sleeve-notes from Stretching Out, an album he recorded with Zoot Sims 54 years and one day ago:
These days, everything’s got science; or cellophane; or it’s frozen, ready to be popped into your old oven; or it’s safe for the kiddies and grandma too — the story is too familiar to all of us to tolerate much reiteration, but Jim, they never have been able to isolate SOUL long enough to deep-freeze it for storage and shipment. In fact, sometimes it seems like they forgot what it was, is and must be to the human heart and mind in our tin-soldier and popgun world. These men on this record know about that and some more besides and you can belive that if you will.
One of the saddening and, to my mind, tragic oversights of this evening’s “jazz” audience is their slavish, slatternly devotion to the immediate and the topical. The eternal seems to be too sticky a substance to mess with — it doesn’t wash off the hands very easy and so I guess people must really want to feel, for the first time, really clean, or sterile, or be in the swim, or hep or maybe even hip if they are some down kitties. Not me, thanks. There’s a lot of dirt, grime and sadness in life, perhaps more than many can cope with but it’s there, right under the edge of the carpet and behind the mirror, under your fingernails and betwixt your pearly teeth. And along with the sour you can have your sweet too, plenty of it, but that sugar doesn’t mean beans without you have some salt to let you know which is which. Admirably stated by Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton in a letter to his sister, to wit; “you got to take the bitters with the sweet” ( Mr Jelly Lord by Alan Lomax, Grove Press and the best book on jazz ever written). So, three long cheers for sadness that is blue instead of yellow, men that can admit to some real joy and know the hearse is parked just ’round the corner and above all, those gents that can say it all in that huge 4/4 beat that makes even this tired old correspondent “glad all over”, Orphan Annie’s old truism. By the way, did they really grab Daddy Warbucks on back income tax?
This all wouldn’t have been possible without Harry Edison and Fred Green, you know. They know as much about the kind of music that I feel as any men who ever lived. They have earned — with no catawauling about travel, working conditions, the plight of the “jazzman” in America today, and related rot — the respect and love of many musicians and listeners, especially those who were around to sop up that great Basie band in the early ’40s. They are, truly GIANTS: yesterday through, and inclusive of, tomorrow. Not an awful lot of that calibre here anymore mbut they’re enough. Ed Jones, Hank, Persip, Zoot and Cohn are of the same mind about this too, so if you all can’t agree in the world who is right, we’ll wait for you to catch up if you’ll hurry.
The album was recorded at Nola’s penthouse on a Sunday afternoon in December and it was fun, fun, fun and happiness. What I wouldn’t do to play with a band like this every night! Ah well, back to the workroom and some more of that score paper so have a good time at the funeral and a good day to all –BOB BROOKMEYER
Valerie Eliot died on 9th November. She was T S Eliot’s second wife. His first marriage to the unhappy and disturbed Vivienne Haigh-Wood was wretched.
“To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”
"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
"I never know what you are thinking. Think."
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
"What is that noise?"
The wind under the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"
Nothing again nothing.
"Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing?"
He married Valerie, his secretary, when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty. He dedicated his only tender love poem to her.
A Dedication to My Wife
To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
The breathing in unison
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.
No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only
But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public.
I googled for a copy to paste and found it on a site of readings for weddings. The arcane modernist wrote a poem that anyone who has been in love can understand.
(A piece about the disappearing breed of literary widows here.)
Distinguished literary critic James Wood at a kitchen-table kit. I’m a big admirer of Wood’s literary criticism – any drummers around to say what they think of his drumming? Should he stick with the day job?
John Wayne in The Searchers. Photograph: AP Photo/Warner Bros
