New Interventions, Volume 13, No 3

A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion
Volume 13, no 3, Autumn 2010, 2.00
The Limitations of Post-Zionism Rudyard Kipling and Imperialism Communism in the Twenty-First Century The Bloody Sunday Enquiry Francisco Ferrer: Revolutionary Educator General Election Autopsy
NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 3
New Interventions
Volume 13, no 3, Autumn 2010
Mike Belbin, Gone For a Soldier
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday
3 5 7 11 19 25 28 32 33 34 38 46 47
Mike Jones, The British People Decide: But What?

The Con-Lib coalition and the Labour leadership competition
Pat Byrne, A New Approach to Europe

How the left should deal with Europe
Tikva Honig-Parnass, The Limitations of Post-Zionism

Disregarding the Palestinian national question
Carr Rouge, Thinking About Communism

The relevance of communism in the twenty-first century
Harry Ratner, Comments on Thinking About Communism

How might the left approach todays problems?
JJ Plant, Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909)

Remembering the revolutionary educator
Paul Flewers, Hitched On His Own Petard

Christopher Hitchens gets it wrong about Animal Farm
Tawneys Wit and Wisdom

Some political quips from Richard Henry Tawney
Chris Gray, Second Glance

Looking at Robert Paxtons analysis of fascism
Graham Milner, Rudyard Kipling and British Imperialism

Assessing one of Britains major poets
Reviews The Invention of the Jewish People Letters Stalinism and Revolution; Yugoslavia
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)
Mike Belbin
Gone For a Soldier

The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday
HE Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday 1972 finally delivered its report, 38 years after the day in question. Set up in 1998 and ready in 2005 but with its publication repeatedly postponed, the 5000-page report concludes that the 14 Bogsiders shot and killed by British troops on 30 January 1972 were all innocent of posing any threat to the soldiers at the time, in fact many were Civil Rights marchers running for cover. Following its release, there were two public responses from the Establishment: one a careful apology to the people of Derry from the Prime Minister, the other a consensus among many politicians and journalists that the soldiers, or indeed anyone involved in the subsequent cover-up, should not stand trial or be subject to any further investigation. In the liberal Observer, Nick Ross agreed: that it would be wrong now to take the junior ranks and make an example of them. The really bad judgements were made by high-ups. The triggerhappy atmosphere was created by people far removed from the streets of Londonderry. (Observer, 20 June 2010) Should we join the consensus and exonerate the soldiers who shot the 14 of any blame? Who can be held responsible for the carnage that day, and what could the Inquiry have done that would have answered to this? Empathy with the private soldier has increased in British culture over the last 100 years. In the nineteenth century, the middle class was content to cheer a parade or victory, but knew next to nothing about conditions in the ranks. Many people now though seem comfortable with the idea that frontline troops should be considered as much victims of war, and sometimes the Establishment, as any other casualties. As a general attitude, this is probably traceable back to the First World War, with its stubborn battle plans and its waste, by any standards, of human life. (See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 1975). Earlier too, in the work of Rudyard Kipling there can be read something like a sympathy with the junior ranks, an example being his verse Tommy (Barrack-Room Ballads, 1892). We arent no thin red eroes, nor we arent no blackguards too, But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you. George Orwell, however, who actually carried a weapon for the Empire in the Burmese police, reckoned that Kipling still left something out: the unavoidable social distinction between the ranks: Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that
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goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. (Rudyard Kipling in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, Penguin, 1965) Many have in recent times declared an empathy with frontline troops despite most people having no experience of a military institution from the inside. Distance might make for indifference in some, but it also seems to mean a generally uncritical attitude in others, especially in a media keen not to appear disloyal. Soldiers of all ranks are more often than not today presented as simple figures of forbearance: their courage lies in going where they are told, and although they might be carrying out an unpopular task for a resented government, those doing their job must never be criticised as it is not of their choice. Among previous generations who could draw on an actual experience of the forces, there was a more informed, even complicated attitude. After 1945, in drama and comedy on TV and radio, the forces, especially the conscript army, were often treated with a humour in which professional bullies (the sergeant major) as well as droopy twits (the upper class officer) were shown bossing around the poor bloody infantry, not all of whom though were exactly Jesus in uniform (check out From Here to Eternity to the officer class accents used in The Goons). This irreverence drew on a popular perception that service life might well consist of fortitude in battle but also mindless chores and pointless drill (the zeal for which, usually on the part of officers and NCOs, was tartly known as bull). Of course, presenting squaddies as victims to be pitied and unquestioningly supported is not necessarily a protest against war or the military: the focus can be on soldiers in junior ranks, earning our respect because they put up with things, enduring harsh circumstances but obeying orders. Junior ranks may be celebrated for being heroic by simply enduring without question, especially as the order-givers are never challenged as to knowing better. Supporters of the troops featured in the media express resentment of civilian politicians, not the high command. This deferring to stoic obedience is perhaps fuelled by a feeling in civilian life now that like the bloody infantry we too have circumstances, and indeed bull, to endure: credit depressions, austerity measures, redundancies and an ever faster turnover of new technology, as so much of the change in ones life now is seen to be ordered from outside, a turbulence that its uncool to question. An example of this kind of empathy with the soldiers
lot was a recent Sun front page headlined MAN DOWN. It showed a close up of a named soldier in Afghanistan whod been shot in the face. Even if in smaller letters below, we were reassured that he was soon up and around, we were first being asked to pity a young man hurt in a dangerous situation. One need not be a Tory Defence Secretary to be moved by pictures of a 19-year-old (or 32-year-old) wounded or killed during recent interventions. The papers own kind of ambivalent policy about the intervention though is summed up in an editorial of 2 August 2010: No matter what people think of the war, everyone who loves Britain supports the troops who are fighting and dying to defeat terrorism. However, even now the Tories are back, the Sun is not above continuing to criticise government red tape in managing war supplies. However, discontented thoughts about the war and the desire to bring the services home, especially from Afghanistan, have been gathering apace, not least among Establishment circles. The Daily Mail, for example, has always been against this intervention. Nor does everyone related to the soldiery support the wars. Some bereaved parents can be heard questioning why we are fighting so far away at all, following this by questions as to the extent of the terrorist threat. Even if Islamist anger presents such a big danger, by means of bombings or the radicalisation of Muslim youth, this has no precisely located base camp. The source of the tragic anniversary just passed (the Tube explosions of 7/7) didnt originate in the Afghan mountains but in Aylesbury, among other British places, as well as the stateless propaganda sites of the Internet. Another war aim, in Iraq too, given by anti-Islamo-fascists like Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens, is to democratise backward and repressive countries. One waits for them, of course, to widen their campaign and call for the invasion of Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, authoritarian (or is it still totalitarian?) China. Of course, even the most revolutionary intended of interventions can be counterproductive, as the Bolsheviks found trying to spread the revolution into Poland. As for the claim that it doesnt matter whose force advances democracy and defeats fascism, will the anti-Islamos not admit that even if we just take the period between their undoubted model the anti-Nazi struggle in Europe and recent times, US imperialism (state and corporate) has shown a poor record of advancing democracy abroad, as seen in the support for authoritarian regimes in Spain, Greece, Latin America and Asia, and the Islamic kingdoms of the Gulf? Why Afghanistan then? As the Afghan Abdul Salam Zaeef put it recently: Afghanistan however is easy for America: they are fighting an ethnic group that does not have extensive roots anywhere else in the world. (My Life with the Taliban, 2010) A superpower may make war to some purpose (in Iraq to secure oil) or just to show that it can, especially when casualties among soldiers and civilians remain low and much can be made in the loyal media of needing to do something about the Jihadist Threat. Nevertheless, more and more people are fed up with a war supposedly fought against a local group (the Taliban) who arent going away, with attitudes shared by a US ally, Saudi Arabia a defensive mission of search and destroy that may even fuel terrorism. As my colleague Paul Flewers proposed: before the invasion, Iraq itself was no home for al-Qaeda Saddam
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being very unfriendly to Muslim rebels now its their securest base. The soldiers themselves may not all give consent by silence. British Lance Corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistic Corp was put in a military prison for going absent without leave (AWOL). He sought to make the point that the war in Afghanistan is illegal under international law (Weekly Worker, 1 July 2010). However, the anti-scapegoat argument that individual troops cannot be blamed at all for any action in dangerous situations or that they were only following orders would be more morally convincing if it was sometimes applied to foreign forces as well. A peasant lad in Latin America or Somalia who joins his army and shoots a demonstrator should be given as much benefit of the doubt as a British private. Why does the latter deserve sympathy that is, for his subaltern position, his pursuit of a well-paid job, his facing riled-up crowds and the former not? As for the defence of only obeying orders: following the Second World War the court cases of Nazis, high and low, took care of that. Orders dont trump human rights, in whatever situation the orders are given. But what were the orders given on the 30 January 1972, and is an examination of them enough to understand what happened on Bloody Sunday? The Inquiry Report (hereafter known as Saville) details the cardinal events of the day like this (see http://report. bloody-sunday-inquiry-org/volume01/chapter003). In Derry, the Civil Rights Association had organised a march to protest at the recent mass internment without trial as well as the ban on marches by the local regime at Stormont. The marchers stopped at the Rossville Flats, to be addressed from a lorry. At the junction of William Street and Rossville Street, then known as Aggro Corner, youths began to taunt 1 Para, a British regiment that had arrived in the city just that morning. Stones were thrown and tear gas fired back, routine events in that spot. At one point two troopers from Machine Gun Platoon fired from a rooftop in William Street. Locals Damien Donaghy (15) and John Johnson (55) were both injured. A member of the Official IRA who lived in the area returned fire but no more shots were exchanged after that. In charge of the Paras on the ground, Colonel Derek Wilford requested by radio that his HQ assent to an order to go in and make arrests. Saville states that at HQ his superior Brigadier MacLellan delayed giving consent because of the risk of soldiers confusing rioters and the march. MacLellan waited until he was sure that marchers and the youths were separate. It was apparently understood that troops were to make arrests, but not chase anyone into the Bogside. With the order confirmed, Colonel Wilford sent not only a company on foot into William Street, but deployed armoured vehicles as well. Saville comments that either Wilford disobeyed his superiors precise order or failed to appreciate the risk of sending armed paratroopers not only down the street but also into the vicinity of the Flats: Colonel Wilford should not have launched an incursion into the Bogside. It was after this that the 14 people were shot, 13 dying immediately, one of the wounded dying later. Some were shot in the back running away, some while wounded on the
ground, some coming to the aid of others. Saville now admits that the accusations made directly afterwards that the victims were carrying petrol bombs, nail bombs or even guns were insupportable. There was, Saville concludes, a loss of fire discipline among the soldiers of Support Company. Who then bears the main responsibility, who created the trigger-happy atmosphere which lead to these deaths? At the time, many British press editorials blamed the IRA (then also known as the Provisionals). In fact the IRA had already announced that no active service units would be out in Derry that day. Peter McMullen, an Irish Catholic who served with the Paras, claimed to have overheard that something was being planned within the regiment. He approached the IRA but the Provos didnt take the information seriously. Surely, the British forces wouldnt risk endangering the lives of peaceful marchers while the whole world was watching. Nevertheless, McMullen requested enough explosive to be able to knock out the Paras gear. The Provos instead gave him a small quantity, which he used to not much effect at the Paras base on 27 January. One factor Saville was asked to investigate was the suggestion that there was a culture among the Crown Forces of shoot-to-kill. This was supposed to involve the understanding that any soldier carrying out such shootings would be granted immunity. In Derry in fact there had already been killing of civilians. On 8 July 1971, two Catholics came under lethal fire during a riot. Neither was carrying a weapon, a fact acknowledged by the British government four years later with compensation for the relatives. Saville, however, says that we are not in a position to express a view whether or not such a culture existed. This is in line with the approach of the Inquiry merely to investigate the events of a single day, exonerating or criticising people present while not inquiring into anything else, despite the expense of time and money incurred. During his apology statement to the Commons, David Cameron said that that though the shootings were an unjustifiable event, the Inquiry had found that there was no premeditation or government cover-up. By January 1972, the situation in Northern Ireland was beyond a brief crisis: curfews and patrols operated in Catholic areas of Belfast, internment without trial had been
tried, the IRA had responded with a car-bomb campaign in the city centre, and troop numbers had been sizeably increased on the ground. The province was a low-intensity war zone, where an explosion of frustration and expectation had occurred within a political slum that was rotten with division and discrimination, its abortion law effectively as stringent as in the Catholic Republic and its paramilitary police force defending a quasi-apartheid society targeting 40 per cent of the population. In 1972, however, the main embarrassment was the sight of street resistance, broadcast around the world. Stormonts first minister Brian Faulkner and the Westminster government no doubt wanted this done away with. The Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, on a flying visit the previous summer, had told army officers that it was their job to deal with these bloody people (Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed, Fourth Estate, 2010, p 44). While commander of British Land Forces Robert Ford commented on 7 January 1972 that the only way to achieve law and order was to shoot selected Derry young hooligans. The Inquiry could have been an opportunity not to fix blame upon individual troops, but to make clear the whole situation out of which Bloody Sunday happened. Many elements played their part: prejudice among serving Paras new to Derry, the sanction for heavy policing and a ready excuse of returning lethal fire. Saville found that all ranks lied about the people who were shot. Even though only one of the parents of the murdered has lived to see the Inquiry deliver, many of the younger relatives arent asking for prosecution but simply investigation of how a cover-up happened, something that in South Africa is part of the truth and reconciliation process. The truth about Bloody Sunday, however, as with the truth about Abu Ghraib, Basra or indeed police killings and cover-ups in Britain, wont be established by either excusing or prosecuting one or two individuals: there may indeed be a culture to blame, if not an actual policy. In Derry in 1972, the state was applying a military solution to a political problem, trying to suppress by force the aspirations of a particular community, a strategy that led to a military rampage one Sunday 38 years ago.
Mike Jones
The British People Decide: But What?

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NUMBER of commentators pointed out that although the British people have spoken in the 6 May General Election, it was unclear as to what they had said. The reason being that no party was given a majority of seats, none was seen fit to govern, and in consequence, after five days of horse-trading, a ToryLiberal-Democrat coalition has
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been formed. Apart from during the Second World War, no coalition has governed since the 1930s. What are we to make of it? Prior to the campaign itself the Tories had for some time been leading in opinion polls and Labour trailing, at times almost catching up but then falling back again as the
scandal of parliamentary expenses unfolded, or yet another attack on Gordon Brown from ex-colleagues emerged, and plots to bring him down by ex-ministers came and went without gathering any momentum. As usual, it was seen as a two-horse race. The campaign kicked off in a boring, low-key fashion until the first of three live TV debates of the main party leaders. Following the one on 15 April it suddenly became a three-horse race, as Nick Clegg, the Lib-Dem leader, became something of a pin-up boy, and Cleggmania developed, out of a person most people would have struggled to name before the TV debate. He became an overnight TV personality. Labours support slumped to third place in the polls and suddenly its leading campaign figures began to talk nice about Nick. The Tories, on the other hand, feeling threatened, began to get nasty, and the Tory press really started to demolish Cleggs image, he was even compared to Hitler. With the Guardian having declared its support for the Lib-Dems, only the Daily Mirror supported Labour. However, as the campaign progressed, the Lib-Dems support ebbed slowly away. The actual result was something of a shock, as was the turn-out, at 65 per cent. Hundreds of voters were queuing for hours outside polling-stations, there were not enough staff nor ballot papers to accommodate them. Up and down the country hundreds were turned away at 22.00 hours not having voted. In 2005 the turn-out had been 61 per cent, up from 59 per cent in 2001 due to postal voting. So disgust at the corrupt practices of many MPs and a sentiment that they are all in it for themselves had not led to greater apathy and abstention. The Tories won 306 seats, up from 198, but not enough to get a majority and hardly a sign of confidence. Many Tories who dislike David Cameron and his shifting the party towards the centre see the campaign as a failure. Labour only won 258 seats, down from 356, but didnt collapse and came in second place. The Lib-Dems actually lost five seats to win only 57. In other words, unusually, no party was given a mandate to govern. In Scotland, Labour won back two seats it had lost in by-elections. Otherwise the number of Lib-Dem and SNP MPs stayed the same, as did that of the Tories one. The Scots must have longer memories than many English people. Yet in Wales, which also used to be a Tory-free zone, they gained five more seats to add to the other three. The Lib-Dems and Plaid Cymru failed to make much of an impact, so Labour is still dominant. It won back the Blaenau Gwent seat from Labour rebels. In Northern Ireland, things stayed the same but for the Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson losing his seat to the non-sectarian Alliance Party in Belfast East. Robinson suffered due to his wifes financial irregularities on behalf of her teenage lover. However, Robinson remains the First Minister in the Northern Ireland devolved government for now anyway. The Tories, in an attempt to make a come-back there, had formed an alliance with the traditional Unionist Party, which has been replaced by the DUP, but it failed to win any seats. The one MP they did have resigned in protest at the alliance and kept her seat in Down North. There was an average swing of five per cent from Labour to the Tories, but in some parts of the country Labour actually experienced a swing from the Lib-Dems. For exam6
ple, the two Hackney seats, and the two Islington seats. In Liverpool, Labour advanced in every seat at the expense of the Lib-Dems, and on the city council too. In Barking, Margaret Hodge, following a campaign by the Labour Party and anti-fascists, not only gained from the Tories, but trounced the British National Party. While in Brighton Pavilion, Caroline Lucas, the popular left-wing leader of the Greens, took the seat from Labour to give them their first one at Westminster. Rogues from all parties, those who are not facing prosecution or who have been thrown out or stood down due to the expenses scandal, were punished by the voters. Tony McNulty, who charged for his parents house; Jacqui Smith, who charged for her real house while living in a room at her sisters when in London; Charles Clarke, who with his chubby, unshaven red face, reminded me of a homeless tramp whod just put down his bottle of cider to speak on TV, and was constantly trying to start a revolt against Brown; Vera Baird, who vigorously opposed attempts to extend the number of days terrorism suspects could be jailed without trial, until she got the Solicitor General post, are just a few of the Labour MPs who were rejected. In Wells, the voters ended an 86-year tradition of electing a Tory by turfing out David Heathcoat-Amory, famous for billing the tax-payers for the upkeep of his garden, including large quantities of horse manure. Doubtless, many of these awful people will have been replaced by others equally unsavoury, but at least a little schadenfreude does cheer one up for a brief moment. Speaking of schadenfreude, it was joyful to see that the BNP not only won no seats, but lost all its 12 seats on the Barking and Dagenham council, suffered a collapse of its vote in Burnley, lost two more of its councillors in Stokeon-Trent (two resigned recently upon discovering Holocaust denial is still alive and well in the BNP). BNP leader Nick Griffins poor result against Margaret Hodge in Barking, the poor showing of deputy leader Simon Darby in Stoke Central, will all add to the crisis in the BNP, with resignations, and a supposed plot to kill Griffin by some party officials before and during the election campaign. And, of course, there is the failure of UKIP to win any seats. Nigel Farage, until recently party leader, got himself ejected from the European Parliament in an attempt to get publicity, and on election day, trying to do the same in a light aeroplane, he crashed to earth. Symbolic? He wasnt badly hurt though. The Lefts Poor Showing Respect was also trounced by Labour, in both Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloways old seat, with a new candidate, and in Poplar and Limehouse, where Galloway stood this time. Only Selma Yaqoob, in Birmingham Hall Green threatened Labour. She got a credible 25.12 per cent of the vote. The Labour candidate who beat Galloway, Rushanara Ali, is the first Bangladeshi elected to parliament, one of three Muslim women to become MPs a sign of progress. Apart from Respects Selma Yaqoob and a dozen or so left-wingers in the Labour Party, the various left-wing parties and electoral coalitions all failed dismally to make any impact. TUSC (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) stood in 32 constituencies in England and Wales, and gained 11 317 votes in all, of which 1592 went to Dave Nellist,
who before being expelled from the Labour Party was a popular Labour MP in Coventry. In Scotland, TUSC stood in 10 constituencies and gained 3523 votes in all, 931 of them going to Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow SW. The scandals Tommys been involved in have eaten away at the standing he had when he led the anti-poll-tax campaign in Scotland. The Scottish Socialist Party stood in 10 constituencies, too, and gained 3157 votes. The SSP looks like it too has been discredited over Tommys scandal and the split with him. The Communist Party of Britain stood in six constituencies and gained 947 votes. CPB members stood in other coalitions, and Avtar Sadig, a member of the Indian Workers Association, CPI (Marxist), stood in Leicester East and gained 494 votes. Clearly, there is no widespread support for left-wingers outside of the Labour Party, in spite of New Labour being discredited in general and specifically in the case of many MPs due to the expenses scandal. The Iraq War is fading as a cause of discontent, and Afghanistan doesnt impact on the general public in spite of a widespread doubt over the purpose of the war. The consequences of the financial and banking crisis are the main concerns. Clegg made it clear that no deal could be done with Labour as long as Gordon Brown remained leader, and he immediately began negotiations about forming a coalition with Cameron. Apparently some contacts to Labour figures also existed. But towards the end of the negotiations brief discussions were held with Labour, though its doubtful whether they were serious. One after another prominent Labour MP went public against a deal with the Lib-Dems. Such a coalition would have had to bring in the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the DUP. It would have been an unstable one. Labour opponents, particularly in the North of England, like David Blunkett, are not only threatened by the Lib-Dems, but also know them well in local government as unprincipled allies, untrustworthy regarding agreements, but in cases where no Tories exist they substitute for them. It surely affected the attitude of some Labour MPs that the governor of the Bank of England said that whoever undertook to reduce the budget deficit would be so unpopular and out of power for a generation. What better than to help destroy the Lib-Dems by allowing them to do the dirty work? The agreement between Tories and Lib-Dems pledges to cut public spending by six billion pounds this year; limits immigration; implements a thoroughgoing welfare reform programme; introduces a school reform programme allowing parents and voluntary groups to set up schools; scraps the introduction of Identity Cards, along with the biometric passport scheme; extends freedom of information, and reviews the libel laws to entail more freedom of speech. The Lib-Dems abandoned their opposition to the renewal of the Trident nuclear submarines, and Britains most enthusiastic pro-EU party agreed to rule out joining the Euro, and to hold referenda before any further sovereignty is transferred to the EU. The Lib-Dems won concessions off the Tories over a referendum to introduce some form of the Alternative Vote system; parliaments will be fixed to five-year terms; the House of Lords will be wholly or mainly elected; tax on the lowest earners will be reduced; the Tory plan to help the very rich through a new inheritance tax has been given up for a year. On the other hand, the Lib-Dems gave up their plan to tax properties worth more than two million pounds. When Charles Kennedy was ousted as Lib-Dem leader,
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the party shifted from social-liberalism to economicliberalism, so the forces Clegg represents can work with those Cameron represents. A Lib-Dem conference in Birmingham gave Clegg the thumbs-up, in spite of Kennedy and even Paddy Ashdown expressing doubts. Right-wing Tories are equally unhappy with Cameron, but this coalition is just what the ruling class needs at this moment in time so it will last until the strains become too great as a result of growing opposition outside parliament over the planned cuts, tax increases and suchlike. The Labour Leadership Contest Assorted Labour MPs talk about the party renewing itself, reconnecting with its traditional supporters, saying that New Labour is dead, and a new set of values must be found. It is difficult to imagine just what these values would be after a commitment to socialism was abandoned and Thatcherite economics adopted. However, the fact that five candidates for the Labour Party leadership are standing two of whom are fairly uncritical of the New Labour project (Andy Burnham and David Miliband); two of whom are quite critical (Ed Balls and Ed Miliband), and one is very critical (Diane Abbott) will ensure that a genuine debate takes place, something that was blocked when Brown replaced Blair. Unfortunately, the five are all similar types, all Oxbridge-educated and middle-class, political advisors and researchers prior to becoming MPs. None has any connection to the working class and either pushed such people aside in order to enter parliament, or were parachuted into solid working-class constituencies by the Labour Party summit. John McDonnell, who would have represented working-class people marginalised by New Labour, once again failed to get the minimum number of nominations from fellow Labour MPs. Andy Burnham still defends his vote to invade Iraq, and is in favour of upgrading the Trident nuclear missile submarine fleet. Hes New Labour to the core, but believes that now is the time to move forward on the national minimum wage and to develop it into a real living wage. Not overnight, of course. David Miliband was implicated in New Labours foreign policy adventures and is a keen errand-boy of US imperialism. When Georgia invaded South Ossetia and shelled its capital, without hesitation he condemned Russia. The EU commission of enquiry blamed Saakashvili, the Georgian president, for starting the war. Likewise, with Israels foreign escapades, Miliband sided with the aggressor. Regardless of his talk about learning from the activists, reconnecting with our voters, and engaging with the trade unionists paying the political levy all designed to get votes he too is New Labour to the core. Trident must be kept so that we can be involved in multilateral disarmament negotiations, he insists. Who can forget Milibands appearances in court trying to prevent documents exchanged between Britain and the USA exposing complicity in the torture of British citizens/residents becoming public? Ed Balls also wants to reconnect, renew the Labour Party, and is scathing about talk in New Labours early years in office of ending the historic trade union link. He would have voted against the Iraq war had he been an MP in 2003, he says, but favours renewing Trident, because of future multilateral talks, and in order to deal with the
Middle East. It will be interesting to find out more of what that involves. Quite obviously it is not a question of fundamentals when Balls criticises New Labour. Ed Miliband too wants an honest discussion about our fundamental direction, something our party hasnt done for nearly two decades, and even wants to find new ways to ensure party members can contribute to the partys policy platform. People outside the party who share our values should be involved in a conversation about our future direction, he adds. One is forced to ask: what are these values? And why are such people outside the party? Well, every drop in support since 1997 saw Blair talk of reconnecting, conversations, along with less spin, etc, but nothing changed. Ed would have opposed the Iraq War had he been in parliament then, and queries the necessity of renewing Trident, though he favours the retention of a nu-
clear deterrent. Miliband Jr, too, only wants to tinker with things. Diane Abbott has made a career for herself about being off-message. She has opposed New Labours economic policy, foreign policy like the Iraq war, the undermining of internal party democracy, the attacks on civil liberties, the renewal of Trident, etc, but exposed herself to ridicule when, after criticising both Blair and Harman for sending their children to schools outside their catchment area, she sent her son to a fee-paying school. Although being a woman of Jamaican origin, she is as litist as the four white men she opposes, but the fact that her politics are much further to the left than theirs means that the debate will be much broader and deeper than otherwise would have been the case.
Pat Byrne
A New Approach to Europe

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HE continuing problems facing the European Union and the Euro raise the question about what position the left should adopt towards the idea of European unity. A Failed Analysis The position of most of the socialist left towards the European Union has long been incorrect, certainly since the 1980s. Socialists only looked at the negative aspects, and never stopped seriously to evaluate the reasons why the European bourgeoisie was being forced into ever closer cooperation. Thus they kept prophesying the break-up of the EU while the contrary was taking place each crisis forcing not the predicted split and collapse, but further integration and growth. The revolutionary left has been predicting the collapse of the EU for over 30 years, but every crisis seems to draw it closer together legally and practically. This is clearly the case whether in the field of economics, health, crime, transport, communications, the environment, agriculture and so on. Each crisis has led the EU to tighten its machinery and increase standardisation. This is nothing to do with the wishes of this group or another. It is just the realities of the modern world. Problems can no longer be solved on a national level. The trends towards continental and world integration demonstrate this. The old position of the left was that the European Economic Community, then the European Community, then the EU would split up under conditions of crisis; that the capitalist thieves would fall out. Underlying this attitude was a clinging to the position of Lenin and Trotsky on imperialism a hundred years earlier. In that theory, capitalism was beset by two main contradictions: private property and the nation state. There can be no doubt that this was a correct characterisation for that epoch and remains the case with private property. However, the failure of the socialist revolution in the West and the continued rise of capitalism
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since the Second World War has dramatically lessened the power of individual nations in an integrating world. Today, the development of ever faster and cheaper means of communication large-scale shipping and containerisation, air transport for passengers and cargo, online phone and electronic links, instant capital investment flows and so on has allowed for the emergence of tightly-bound chains of global production and distribution. Standardisation and legal and political links have quickly followed as reflected in the development of the World Trade Organisation and other international institutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the entry of China into the world trading system have strengthened this process. The drive towards privatisation, abolition of import controls and national ownership rules, floating currencies and other neo-liberal policies have accelerated the integration. As a result of all these trends, the interdependence of world production has reached unprecedented levels. The most obvious indication of the effect of this on the nation state is the absence of world war or of serious trade wars for 65 years. The world multinationals which control the politicians in most countries would move might and main to prevent the recurrence of such events, which would be a dire threat to their economic interests. The process of world integration is also reflected in the trend towards regional and continental economic integration. Thus we see the emergence of the EU, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the ASEAN process, the integration of the GGC countries in the Middle East, and the growing cooperation in the Latin American and Caribbean hemisphere. Clearly this is still a process in the making. The United States continues to hold a powerful position in the world economy, although its pre-eminence has been much reduced through the emergence of the EU, Japan and China, as well as India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, South Korea, Ar-
gentina and the oil producers in Russia and the Middle East. The recent expansion of the G8 into the G20 leading economies is a recognition of this fact. In the absence of socialist transformation, we cannot predict how far these trends towards regional and global integration will go. Some elements of the Leninist left maintain that it will all go into reverse under the pressure of future crises. But this sounds more like wishful thinking to justify an historical canon of faith rather than any profound analysis of concrete facts. Perspectives for the Future of the EU Obviously, we cannot say that a break-up of the Euro and even of the EU is ruled out. Individual states could go it alone for short-term advantage, but this would tend to spark off a tit-for-tat currency and trade war which would be disastrous in the medium to longer term. It would leave the individual European countries naked in the face of world competition. This would be a terrible setback for the interests of all the big European capitalists. Their strategists and political representatives realise this, and they are determined to avoid it. Of course, in extreme circumstances irrational developments can take place. But a break-up of the EU is not the most likely perspective. If you look at the discussions about Greece, quite apart from the sensational coverage and speculation which is the stock-in-trade of journalists, or the cheap knee-jerk demagogy of politicians like Sarkozy, the more serious forces in the EU are moving towards even greater centralisation in order to solve the crisis. The formation of a stabilisation fund of 1000 billion Euros is the first step in this. Now they are talking about curbing the power of the Euroland governments to spend beyond their budgets. This is the logical extension of setting up the Euro in the first place. Public Opinion Another important factor in the equation is the mood of the European population. There is no doubt that there is growing dissatisfaction with the EU among the public. But this is very much tied together with the growth of reactionary nationalism. This reflects profound economic and social dissatisfaction among the mass of people in Europe which is directly related to the effects of neo-liberal policies and the economic crisis. However, these moods can swing to the right and the left depending on many factors. At the moment the trend is to the right, but the inability of the right-wing parties to improve anything, indeed their tendency to make them worse through austerity measures, will soon discredit their agenda. We can expect a swing back to the left as we are already seeing in France and Germany. Irrespective of these passing moods, the European ruling class has its own agenda which is based on ever closer integration. To achieve this they dont really care about public opinion. If they lose referendums such as we saw with the new constitution/Lisbon Treaty, they just hold another and mobilise the media and the political classes until they get the result they want. This is what happened in Ireland and earlier in Denmark. If they lose a referendum, they can even cease holding them, as in the case of France and Holland. Meanwhile, the left picks up on every negative development in the EU in order to forecast its demise. But it then gets wrong-footed when its forecasts continually turn
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out to be wrong. This must be puzzling and demoralising for its followers. Placing Demands on the EU I think that the lefts position against the European Union has been completely bypassed by events. The EU is now a fact of life. This has obvious implications. The bourgeoisie has created powerful European institutions, yet we dont place demands on them in the belief that there is no point because these institutions will break apart. The result of the false past perspective of the break-up of the EU meant that much of the socialist left was unwilling to place demands upon EU institutions. This was a ludicrous approach. Wherever the bourgeoisie creates institutions of power one has to make demands on them. It would be like ceasing to place demands on the Belgian government because you thought the country might break up at some indeterminate time in the future. Contrast this to the capitalists, who devote large resources to lobbying the EU institutions to get the legislation they want. They do this because they know that real power resides in Brussels, and laws and decisions are being made there that affect their business interests and the lives of the European population. In such circumstances, the left has to counteract the capitalists and fight for its own interests in the EU. For a Socialist United States of Europe In arguing against the EU, the left has usually ended up counterposing to it the slogan of a Socialist United States of Europe. All very worthy, but totally abstract. In response to the current crisis, a bold transitional programme on a European scale is needed. But how can one place real demands on an institution that doesnt exist? What credibility could it have? This is the reason that this slogan has achieved no traction from the workers movement. Some decades ago when it was still the European Economic Community comprising a limited number of countries in Western Europe, there was some validity in the argument that the EEC was only a part of Europe, and that a United Socialist Europe was a better solution. But since the creation of the European Union embracing almost all European countries, having a common currency among many and the introduction of greater and greater powers, even this argument has fallen by the wayside. Backward-Looking and Reactionary One of the appalling consequences of the EU rejectionist position of the Leninist movement was that it effectively lined it up with the most reactionary, nationalist sections of society. Despite the best of efforts, its campaigns against the EU and its treaties, etc, are seen by the populations in each country as part of the anti-European, anti-foreigner movement. The left groups have been drowned out by the right wing on this issue. A classic example of this was shown in Britain in last years Euro elections. The left-wing (including the Campaign for a Workers International Socialist Party) campaign No to EU, Yes to Democracy was hard to distinguish from that of the right-wing UK Independence Party material. Another example was in the Irish referendum last October on the Lisbon Treaty. The propaganda from the Socialist Party (CWI) and its Dil member Joe Higgins was mainly about how the Lisbon Treaty would take democracy
away from the Irish people, with the implication that somehow Irish bourgeois democracy with all its horsetrading, patronage and corruption was more democratic. They also argued that the Lisbon Treaty would assist the implementation of neo-liberal policies, yet Ireland is possibly the leading country in Europe for neo-liberal policies, policies which attracted massive amounts of foreign investment, but which has now put it in such a deep crisis. To direct the deep discontent within Irish society away from the Irish bosses and their corrupt political system and towards the EU was completely the wrong way to pose the question, and could only help to confuse working people and reinforce reactionary prejudices. The criticisms made of the EU are valid, but they could be made of most of the individual countries too. There is a myth that the anti-EU left pushes that the EU is the source of these destructive trends. Some working people may buy into this propaganda, but many dont. Another myth that the left pushes is that individual countries are somehow more democratic than the European institutions. You only have to go out in the street and ask what people think of democracy in their countries nowadays. They think it is a game played by corrupt politicians and the media. That whoever you vote for, they will do what they want anyway. In my opinion, we have to break out of this logjam, and it cant be done by continuing down the old nationalist road, no matter how much it is dressed up in internationalist language. A Socialist Programme for the European Union The process of European integration offers great opportunities for the socialist left. For instance, they provide institutions through and around which to organise meaningful
international action. They also offer a great chance to campaign for really radical programmes based on levelling up wages and conditions, social standards, etc. In contrast to the negative approach of the left and defensive campaigns restricted to opposing neo-liberal policies, militarism and so on, we need to develop a programme for the democratic and socialist transformation of the EU. This programme needs to include the thorough democratisation of EU institutions, workers demands for shorter working hours, higher wages, etc, along with proposals for democratic public ownership of the main levers of the European economy so that democratic planning of Europes resources can be achieved. Such a programme needs to be intelligent, coherent, carefully argued and well-presented, with the various elements emphasised in the appropriate situations. Such a programme would lift the sights of the workers: it is often difficult to argue for much more than defensive slogans in the individual countries where the public have accepted that there are not the resources to deliver major gains. But on a European scale, workers can see that the resources exist for much more ambitious demands. A positive programme for a socialist EU which included both minimum and maximum demands would have a much better chance of cutting across the reactionary nationalist and racist propaganda. And it would help us break away from the nation-focused, defensive and backwardlooking image that dominates the left today. This would generate a lot of interest among serious workers, intellectuals, sections of the media and so on. A socialist programme for the EU could form the basis for an excellent intervention in the European Social Forum and European election campaigns in the future.
Appendix: The Basis for European Unity

Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rising bourgeoisie created new nation states with stronger regions imposing the power over weaker provinces and turned areas of Europe into handy-sized governable areas. Parts of Europe already had functioning national borders, such as Spain, but scattered monarchies as in Italy and Germany needed a bigger economic and military framework than Savoy or Saxony could provide; by the late nineteenth century all this work had been completed. Whereas feudalism had lasted for more than eight centuries, national capitalism raced along its path of growth for a few decades; by the end of the nineteenth century, the capitalist nation state had already run up against the confines of its borders and the continental war was pre-programmed to liberate the new productive forces and break out of national limitations in an effort to conquer and acquire continental dimensions. Now, nearly 100 years after that and subsequent destruction, Europe capitalism has demonstrated without question that only a continental economy at the least is able to contain the completely recovered and massively increased productive capacity of modern technology and logistics. The Lisbon Treaty is but another expression of the needs of the system to leap forward from the nineteenth-century organisation in nation states and to create an appropriate vehicle for the rule of capital in this new phase. Looking at the hiccups and conflicts described from the founding years of the USA, we see the hegemony of class over class, of region over region, of the rule of capitalism over slavery, right up to armed border conflicts between American states until the cataclysm of the Civil War which finally put the stamp on the shape of the USA as a modern capitalist state. The early years of the EU and the Euro are pacific by comparison, and the efforts by European capital are to organise on a continental basis, dispensing with the superfluous nation state. Everywhere it is the often pusillanimous fearful consciousness of the indigenous European populations which lags behind that drive of capitalism to produce rationally across borders; the reasons are clear working people rightly fear that the (main) beneficiaries of the new Euro-state will be their employers. However, Marxists have always trumpeted the need for and advantages of international socialist ownership and planning as the next stage in history. The need to overcome national borders is something the left has in common with the capitalist class each in its own way, of course. Walter Held
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Tikva Honig-Parnass
The Limitations of Post-Zionism

A Solution That Disregards Palestinian National Rights and Resistance
HIS book1 is clear proof of the danger inherent in ideologically-inflected theories of identity politics. These are precisely the positions that underlie the work of Yehuda Shenhav and his colleagues among Israeli post-Zionists, positions which in the past have been applied to an analysis of Israeli society and the countrys political regime.2 In translating now these theories and the ideologies behind them to a political proposition that concentrates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its origin and resolution, Shenhav ends up completely disregarding Palestinian national aspirations as expressed by their authentic political and intellectual representatives on both sides of the Green Line3 and in the Diaspora. He calls for one open space throughout the entirety of Mandate Palestine, an open space in which the settlements in the West Bank will remain among a multitude of cantons religious, civic and national. Disclosing the misleading assumptions which pave the way to this totally unacceptable solution is most important since Shenhav represents, in the eyes of some progressives in Israel and abroad, a radical left which is presumed to share universal values of justice and equality. In their analysis of the Israeli regime and society, Shenhav and other leading post-Zionist scholars have adopted the theoretical frameworks of post-modernism. Like multiculturalism and post-colonialism, this formation of postZionism also boils down to identity politics. The depiction of Zionism as a colonising project and Israel as an expansionist settler state has not been placed at the centre of this version of post-Zionist analysis. Hence, what ends up being
ignored is the distinct nature of the Palestinians oppression as the colonised minority which survived the 1948 Nakba. Their oppression is equated with the oppression of other identity groups in Israel, mainly to that of Jewish Mizrahim. Both Palestinian citizens and Mizrahim are perceived as the victims of the Ashkenazi (of European extraction) state which forces its culture upon them, silencing their voices and systematically erasing their identity. Accordingly, the main dividing line in Israel is that between Ashkenazi-Zionist Orientalist oppressors and the Oriental oppressed Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs alike.4 However, as Ehud Ein-Gil and Mosh Machover rightly emphasise: despite the subjective Orientalist racism of most veteran Zionist leaders, the objective logic of the Zionist project has eventually led to the cooptation of a substantial Mizrahi lite. Moreover, with the passage of time the ethno-cultural aspect of oppression of the Mizrahim stressed by the Mizrahi identity ideologues has gradually receded in importance as compared with the socio-economic disadvantage of the Mizrahi masses.5 Due to his identitarian and culturalist perspective, Shenhav has not attempted to come to grips with the distinction
4. Mizrahim, broadly speaking, are Jews belonging to, or originating from, communities that have lived for several centuries in Muslim countries. The Ashkenazim the term is Medieval Hebrew for Germans are Jews belonging to, or originating from, communities that lived in Central and Eastern Europe. Mizrahim are often confused with Sephardim, the Jewish communities originating from the Iberian peninsula, from which they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century by the Catholic Kings. Those Sephardim who migrated to Mediterranean Muslim countries lived there alongside Mizrahi communities and partly merged with them, but largely preserved their distinct cultural identity and Ladino (JudeoSpanish) language. The radical leaders among the second generation of immigrants from Arab states have defined themselves as Mizrahim. In her corrected article published together with three other radical Mizrahim, in News From Within, Volume 8, no 1, January 1997, A Special Supplement: Mizrahim and Zionism, pp 29-49, Ella Shohat changed the headline of her article to Mizrahim in Israel: Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims. 5. Ehud Ein-Gil and Mosh Machover, Zionism and Oriental Jews: Dialectic of Exploitation and Cooptation, Race and Class, Volume 50, no 3, 2009, pp 62-76. 11
1.
3.
Yehuda Shenhav, In The Trap of The Green Line [Bemalkodet Hakav Hayarok]: A Jewish Political Essay (Am Oved Publishers, Tel Aviv, 2010, in Hebrew). Yossi Yonah and Yehuda Shenhav, The Multi-Cultural Condition, Theory and Criticism, no 17, Fall 2000, pp 163-89; Yehuda Shenhav, Notes on Identity in a Post-National Society, Theory and Criticism, no 19, Fall 2001, pp 5-17; and Yehuda Shenhav and Hannan Hever, The Postcolonial Gaze, Theory and Criticism, no 20, Spring 2002, pp 9-23. See also Yossi Yona, The Virtue of Difference: The Multicultural Project in Israel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute/Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad Publishing House, Jerusalem, 2005). Although it appeared long before the post-Zionists, the seminal work of Ella Shohat was the first to adopt the cultural identity approach to depict the nature of Zionism, and the Mizrahim and Palestinians as its victims. See Ella Shohat, Sepharadim in Israel: Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Jewish victims, Social Text, nos 19/20, 1988, pp 1 35. The 1949 Armistice lines agreed upon in Rhodes.
between the class oppression of Mizrahi Jews and the colonial-national oppression of Palestinians. This distinction was explored in Matzpens6 publications decades before the Mizrahi post-Zionist/identity intellectuals emerged.7 Nowhere in Shenhavs academic writings is there an attempt to address Matzpens perspective elaborated by Machover,8 and substantiated by sociologist Gershon Shafir,9 regarding the specific colonial nature of Zionism. Both Machover and Shafir, who followed in his footsteps, depicted Zionist colonialism as similar to the North American colonial model in which the indigenous population were to be ethnically cleansed. Unlike the South African Apartheid system which was based on the exploitation of the vital labour power of the colonised blacks, the Palestinian population has been considered dispensable for nation-building and for the development of the Israeli economy. Hence, the idea of completing the 1948 ethnic cleansing continues to loom large in the thinking of the political, military and security establishment in Israel, as well as among well-known academics such as Benny Morris. By the same token, Shenhav and his co-thinkers were blind to the strengthened national consciousness of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which has developed greatly since the mid-1990s, when Dr Azmi Bishara, a founder and leader of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), rearticulated Palestinian citizens demands for equality. Unlike the Israeli Communist Party, Bishara located the challenge to the Zionist Jewish state at the centre of the struggle of its Palestinian citizens. Even back in the 1990s both Bishara and the NDA at large saw the de-Zionisation of the colonial settler state of Israel as a necessary condition for gaining real equality; namely, recognising them as a national group which is the rightful owner of this land part and parcel of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation.10
6. The Marxist anti-Zionist Israeli Socialist Organisation known as Matzpen (literally, compass) the name of its publication was founded in 1962 by Mosh Machover among others. They have been the first and until now almost the only ones in the Israeli left to depict the state of Israel as not only a product of Zionist colonisation but also an instrument for its further advancement and expansion. 7. See Emmanuel Farajoun, Class Divisions In Israeli Society, in Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East (Saqi Books, London, 1984). The volume contains reprints from the journal Khamsin, 1976-83. 8. Mosh Machover, Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust Annual Lecture (30 November 2006); and see by the same author Is it Apartheid?, Jewish Voice for Peace, November 2004. 9. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of IsraeliPalestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). See also the recent book by Gabriel Piterberg, The Return of Zionism (Verso Books, London, 2010), and the debate between him and Zeev Sternhell, New Left Review, no 62, March 2010. 10. For a sample of Azmi Bisharas publications, see A Short History of Apartheid, Al-Ahram, no 672, 14 January 2004; Jewishness Versus Democracy, Al-Ahram, 27 October3 November 2004); Israel, Palestine and the Question of Citizenship, 6 February 2004, a revised Web version of a speech delivered at St Anthonys College Oxford; and What We Must Do, Al-Ahram, 4 April 2008. Also see Toufic Haddad, Redefining Equality as Rejecting the Jewish State: An Interview With NDA-Tajamu MK Azmj Bishara, in Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad (eds), Be12
I: Ignoring Zionism as the Source of IsraeliPalestinian Conflict. Shenhav claims that the liberal left is responsible for the freezing of the political process due to the unacceptable positions which have moulded Israels peace initiatives since the Oslo Accords in 1993. The 1967 paradigm which underlined these peace initiatives assumes that the 1967 Occupation constituted the moral turning point in what had been up until then a just and upright Israel. The 1967 war is for the liberal left the source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and hence doing away with its consequences is the key for the resolution of the conflict: dismantling the settlements and withdrawing to the Green Line as a basis for a two-state solution. However, argues Shenhav, this solution is futile because it does not address the four central issues which underlie the conflict: the 1948 refugees, the 1948 Palestinians [Palestinian citizens of Israel who survived the Nakba], the settlement project, and what he names the Third Israel, on which he later elaborates. Hence, he argues, the 1967 Paradigm should be replaced by the 1948 Paradigm. It was the 1948 war that gave birth to the problems that cannot be solved within the framework of the former paradigm. The year of 1948 is point zero, the foundational event which contains within it the true basis for the conflict. All later developments stem from the 1948 war, including the military operations launched by Israel. These operations simply continued the ethnic cleansing of the space [his term for Mandate Palestine] that began in 1948. Moreover, the 1967 war was but the expansion of the 1948 achievement. And since 1948 is the source of the conflict, it should be the point of departure for its resolution. The primary aspects of this resolution must be the erasure of the Green Line and the opening of the entire space in which a variety of Palestinian and Jewish communities, including the settlements, would live peacefully alongside each other. Shenhav considers that the liberal lefts main motive for adopting the 1967 Occupation as the source of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is their quest morally to cleanse themselves from the wrongs committed in 1948 and to nourish the image of Israel as a democratic state. However, stating that the 1948 war (and not 1967) is the source of the conflict is equally misleading. It serves Shenhavs tendency to ignore the settlercolonial nature of the Zionist project, which almost from its inception was involved in colonial practices of dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian population, aspired to an exclusivist Jewish state over the entire Mandate Palestine, and to effect a mass expulsion of the Palestinians, which was indeed implemented in 1948. Yotam Feldman, reporting on his interview with Shenhav upon the publication of this book, says: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an inseparable part of the Zionist enterprise, and just as 1967 is the continuation of 1948 (as rightly pointed out by Shenhav), so is 1948 the continuity of 1917. Therefore, he asks Shenhav: Why determine 1948 as the point zero for the contween the Lines: Readings in Israel, the Palestinians and the US War Against Terror (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2007), pp 236-53.
flict? This is quite an arbitrary statement. One can think about other significant intersections: the Balfour declaration or the 1936 Great Arab Rebellion.11 Despite his evasive and fuzzy language, Shenhavs answer discloses his motivation justifying the Jewish Zionist state: This is a question that bothers me. Indeed, why not, for example, 1917? Fascinating things happened not only in the Balfour Declaration but also in the process of its writing. However, there is something different about this point. I have intentionally chosen 1948 because I think that the State of Israel should not be smashed. I have chosen 1948 precisely because I want every historic analysis to include the achievements of the State of Israel. If we go back to the Balfour Declaration, we return to a very difficult situation from the point of view of the Jews. [At] the very place I chose as point zero I stop considering the bifurcations and accept what happened until then as natural. From this perspective, the place you choose [to start with] is the one in which you establish your political position. I accept as a presupposition the existence of Israel, its characteristics, as a necessary part of the analysis, because I dont want to destroy it [Israel]. II: The Straw-Man of the Liberal Left Consonant with ignoring the Zionist essence of the State of Israel, Shenhav disregards the commitment of the liberal left to Zionism as its central characteristic. Instead, the ideology of the liberal left is depicted not as Zionist but as nationalistic ideas anchored in the Green Line. An essential consequence of avoiding a direct discussion of Zionism is that the role of Zionist left intellectuals as the legitimators of the settlers colonial state is totally ignored. In fact, however, the majority of the Israeli liberal left has traditionally supported the Zionist labour movement, the leading force in the pre-state Yishuv,12 and which set in place the camouflaged apartheid legal and institutional infrastructure of the state after its establishment. Even after the loss of Labours exclusive rule in 1977 and the ascent to power of the right-wing Likud, Zionist left supporters continued to form the economic, legal and social lites, as well as the core of the academic and intellectual circles. These intellectuals continued to fulfil their traditional role in articulating Zionist ideology and granting their moral and theoretical legitimacy to policies that systematically devastated the Palestinian people. Hence, one wonders about the apologetic language Shenhav uses in explaining the silence of the liberal public including academics, publicists and even judges regarding the 1956 massacre which took place in Kafar Kassem on the eve of Israels Sinai-Suez campaign. The army murdered 40 Palestinian citizens among whom were women and children upon their return from their daily labour in the fields, unaware of the curfew that had been imposed on their village in their absence:
The silence of the liberal public is an inseparable part of the distorted model which had been created in 1948. The liberal public perceived the massacre as an isolated event, through a moral perception which attributed the event to specific people, not to the political model itself. This is a position which disconnects the massacre from the model which had been fixed in 1948. (p 89) Shenhavs disregard for the fact that this very model has been sustained by the liberal left intellectuals themselves is perfectly in line with his general approach: accepting the rhetoric of the Zionist left at its face value, without exposing it as a pretext for policies which seem to contradict it. The central misleading assumption of Shenhavs attack against the liberal left is that they genuinely sanctify the Green Line, and call for dismantling the settlements and for separation from the 1967 Occupied West Bank. However, governments headed by Labour till 1977 and occasionally thereafter, as well as coalition governments in which Labour participated in subsequent years, have themselves constructed the institutional and legal networks which ensured the de facto annexation of the West Bank to Israel. Labour governments have thus institutionalised a single, unified Israeli regime throughout Mandate Palestine (in part subcontracted to the Palestinian Authority). No less important is the fallacy of portraying the Zionist left as if it still existed as a distinct political and ideological trend. As the historian Tom Segev points out, Shenhavs attack is directed at a liberal left which has turned into a shadow of its past.13 However, as a matter of fact, there was never an actual schism between left and right as far as the central premises of Zionism are concerned. As historian Avi Shlaim shows, the only difference between Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist Labour movement, and Jabotinsky, the forefather of the right-wing Herut and Likud parties, was in the sequence of the stages that the project of an exclusivist Jewish state in the entire area of Palestine had to take in order to achieve its aims.14 With time, even the secondary differences between right and left have been eroded. The turning point in this process was in 2000, when Arafat rejected the generous offer of then Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the second Intifada broke out. It was, as is well known, the Labour Prime Minister Barak who coined the slogan there is no partner for peace, which was embraced by the majority of Israeli society. At the same time, however, Likud and Kadima, depicted as right-wing or centrist, adopted the pragmatism of the Zionist left, as well as its hypocritical discourse relating to the peace process. Beginning with Ariel Sharon, who won the 2001 elections, right and centre started declaring that they favour the principles of partitioning the land and the two-state solution previously the position of the Zionist left alone.15 Towards the end of
13. Tom Segev, Giving Up Independence, Haaretz (Weekly Supplement), 19 February 2010. 14. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, New York, 2001), p 21. 15. For a genuine search for a just solution believed to be embodied in a two-state solution, see Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (Paradigm, Boulder and London, 2007), Chapter 5: The IsraelPalestine Conflict, pp 158-161, 163-176. 13
11. Yotam Feldman, The State of All Its Mizrahim, Haaretz (Weekend Supplement), 19 February 2010. 12. The organised Zionist Jewish community in Palestine before 1948.
November 2008, when polls were predicting greatly diminished support both for Labour and for Meretz (a Zionist party, to the left of Labour) and the rise of the right, Yossi Beilin announced his resignation from his post as Chair of Meretz. Beilin, who had been amongst the most active and formative political figures in shaping Israels various peace plans, claimed he had accomplished his and Meretzs political aim regarding the partition of Eretz Israel, declaring that this principle had now been adopted by the majority of Israeli society. But the broad-based adoption of Labours positions signified a rather pyrrhic victory for the Zionist left: it lost the rationale for any distinct political existence and has become an entirely irrelevant political force. No wonder that Labour can participate in the present most extreme right-wing coalition headed by Likud, alongside the fascist Avigdor Lieberman, the chair of Israel Beytenu (the most extreme of the secular right-wing parties), who openly calls for transfer that is, the expulsion of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Until now even those Labour MPs who declare their commitment to the old social-democratic values of their party have not taken any steps towards leaving this government in which their leader Ehud Barak serves as the Minister of Defence. The fact that Shenhav avoids describing Israel as a Zionist colonial-settler state and its liberal left as the legitimators of the Zionist Jewish state opens the way for him to develop his thesis on the Ashkenazi nature of Israel. He can now present the Ashkenazi origin and Orientalist world-view of the liberal lites as the main determining factor in their support of the peace plans initiated by the Zionist left. III: The Ashkenazi State and the Ashkenazi Left Blurring Palestinian Nationhood Shenhav contends that the quest for separation which underlies the lefts two-state solution is explained by the Ashkenazi origin of its members and their Orientalist and racist worldview. The Ashkenazi left, he claims, aspired to break with the 1967 Occupied Territories in order not to lose the European-Ashkenazi majority of the State of Israel: The 1967 paradigm of the liberal left does not stem, then, only from the fear that Palestinian demographic growth may destroy the Jewish identity of the state, as they claim, but also from their anxiety about the possibility that Israel would become a society with an oriental majority. This Green Line language is a language through which Israel is described as a liberal democracy and the Arabs, together with Mizrahim and the religious, are depicted as inferior and not sufficiently democratic. This is the language of the one who comes to the Middle East for a short time, not aiming to become integrated into it, but to exist there as a visitor [unlike the indigenous inhabitants Arabs and Mizrahim alike]. (pp 52-53) As mentioned above, racism had indeed characterised Zionist leaderships since the very beginnings of the colonisation of Palestine. The Zionist left and its intellectual supporters have no doubt shared the Orientalist perspective prevailing among the Israeli establishment. However, just as the Ashkenazi origin of the Israeli liberal lites does not suffice to
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explain the oppression of Mizrahim, it also does not explain their motives for supporting the peace plans which ostensibly sanctify the Green Line. Substituting the colonial essence of the state and the left with racism alone to the exclusion of class has brought Shenhav to even more futile positions than those presented in his earlier academic writings regarding the allegedly similar victimisation of Mizrahim and Palestinians. Blurring the issue of Palestinian nationhood by adopting an identitarian and culturalist perspective results in a false analogy between the racist nature of oppression of the Jews in Europe and the colonialistnational oppression of the Palestinians the indigenous inhabitants of the land: Of course the question of the Palestinians in Israel is not completely identical with the question of Jews in Europe. However, one may argue, without committing the crime of anachronism, for a similarity between them. This is the case because the Jewish state demands from its Palestinian citizens [as did European states] to live as a minority without collective political rights in the Israeli public sphere, which is not secular but religious and nationalist. (p 83)16 Ignoring the Palestinians national demands is even more conspicuous when one takes into consideration the four Position Papers17 released in 2007 by leading organisations of the Palestinians in Israel. These documents indicate that Bishara and the NDAs political perspectives have been adopted in principle by the majority of the intellectual and political leadership of the Palestinian citizens of Israel who participated in writing them. Namely, their challenge to the notion of a Jewish Zionist state and their demand for dismantling its Zionist political, social and ideological character. Moreover, as confirmed by a study by Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha, the majority of the Palestinian public agrees with these positions.18
16. Shenhavs negligent way of dealing with the central feature of Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state which by definition cannot recognise its Palestinian citizens as a national group can explain his mistaken quotation from the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (known as the Declaration of Independence). He claims that the Declaration promises that the State of Israel would ensure equal rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race and nationality (emphasis added, p 90), but in fact precisely due to the Declarations nonrecognition of any other nationality but the Jewish one, it promises that the state would ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex (emphasis added). 17. One of these documents, The Future Vision of the Palestinians in Israel, was issued by the Palestinians highest and the most authoritative representative vis--vis the state the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arabs in Israel. The Position Paper named the Haifa Declaration was written by figures identified with various parties, including the NDA and Hadash (the front headed by the Communist Party), but not with the Islamic movement. Professor Nadim Rouhana, director of Mada alCarmel the Arab Centre for Applied Social Research in Haifa spearheaded this initiative. The two other position papers are the Ten Points of the Mossawa Centre, and the Democratic Constitution of the Adalah Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. 18. Sammy Smooha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel (2007),
The growing national identity among Palestinian citizens of Israel, their challenge to the Jewish Zionist state and their increasing solidarity with fellow Palestinians and Arabs outside Israel have resulted in their facing policies and proposed laws aimed at stripping them of their rights to the point of revoking their citizenship. In reaction to the Position Papers, the head of the Shabak Yuval Diskin has even gone so far as to announce that the Shin Bet security service will thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, even if such activity is permitted by the law.19 IV: A New Israeli Left The Democratic Right and the Settlers Alongside 1948 Intellectuals Now that Zionism and its colonial settler state, on the one hand, and Palestinian nationhood which challenges it, on the other, have been removed from the centre of analysis, the way is clear for Shenhav to undertake his next task. He can now argue for the identity of interests of all groups which apparently oppose the 1967 paradigm and the Green Line. This purported common denominator of all the groups that reject the 1967 paradigm brings Shenhav himself to feel closer to the right, who understand more than the left the real meaning of the 1948 war as the source of the conflict (p 10). Moreover, in his interview with Feldman, Shenhav emphasises that the political analysis provided by the right is the one with which he identifies most. One of the right-wing leaders with whom Shenhav explicitly identifies is Likud leader and Member of Knesset Benny Begin, a most impassioned devotee of the ideology of The Greater Land of Israel. Shenhav says: Two months ago I read an article by Benny Begin in Haaretz, and I agree with every word. I myself could have written the same regarding the failure of the peace project and the fact that there is no way to continue it. Like Begin, Shenhav is also against an off-the-shelf twostates solution enforced by the Americans. He adds: Our [Begins and his] analysis is the same analysis, even though our normative conclusions are different.20 The artificial separation between analysis and political goals which Shenhav names normative conclusions is embarrassing, to say the least. Moreover, he himself attributes great significance to the similarity between his analysis and that given by one of the most determined annexationist supporters of the Greater Land of Israel, Rabbi Avi Giser; this, in fact, erases the different normative conclusions from the identical political analysis. These normative differences are precisely what should have distanced any progressive intellectual such as Shenhav claims to be, from
available online at www.sammy-smooha; http://soc.haifa.ac.il/ ~s.smooha. 19. Yoav Stern, From the Prime Ministers Office to Balad [NDA]: We Will Thwart Anti-Israel Activity Even if Legal, Haaretz, 16 March 2007, emphasis added. 20. Yotam Feldman, The State of All Its Mizrahim, Haaretz (Weekend Supplement), 19 February 2010. Shenhav is well aware of the different normative conclusions of the right: many parts of the right object to the two-state solution and support a multinational state with an Apartheid regime. The settlement enterprise in its present form spearheads this model. (Shenhav, In The Trap of The Green Line, p 34) 15
finding affinities with the extreme right. But Shenhav embraces the mere objection to the Green Line, disconnecting it from its political and ideological context, as a common denominator for a variety of different and even contradictory ideological and political forces. Amazingly, for Shenhav, these political forces include not only large sections of the democratic right, but also Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, as well as the radical left who object to the principle of separation. To demonstrate the prevailing alleged opposition among the right to the separation principle, Shenhav quotes the settler Ruth Ben-Chaim of the West Bank settlement Ginat Shomron, who is nevertheless active against the construction of the fence (namely, the Apartheid wall): Those who erected the fence wanted that all of us [settlers] would run away. They thought that living outside the State [of Israel] will be unbearable for us. But I dont live in the State, I live in the Land [of Israel], so I dont need to have a fence in its centre. (p 32) Shenhav argues that the objection to the Green Line exists mainly among four groups: They all oppose the conceptualisation of the Green Line and its implementation, and consider it (including its imaginary versions) as an arbitrary and violent border line. 1. The 1948 refugees for whom the Green Line freezes their historic time in 1948. For part of them 1967 is not only a moment of Occupation but also a moment of liberation and an opening up of the space. 2. The women and men of the greater Land of Israel camp who do not accept the partition of the Land. 3. Men and women of the Third Israel, Mizrahi settlers for whom Shas is the central representative, as well as orthodox Jews and Russian immigrants who moved to live beyond the Green Line, for whom Lieberman is the salient representative. 4. A radical political section among 1948 Palestinians, including the Sons of the Land movement [a nationalistic movement who ban participation in general elections] and parts of the NDA who do not accept the Green Line, and also Palestinian intellectuals who have advanced this agenda in the last few years. (p 18) The alleged common aspirations of these diverse groups to open the space will supposedly create a new Israeli left which will change the political map of Israel. This new left will include the radical left, Palestinians and settlers who may form a productive coalition, a unified front for a more just solution based on one shared space. Two main constituencies among the settlers are assumed to be motivated to reach a comprehensive political settlement which would include the erasure of the Green Line the Third Israel and the democratic settlers. The Third Israel consists of lower socio-economic strata of Israeli Jews mainly Mizrahim but also orthodox and Russian immigrants who went to live in settlements in an
attempt to improve their living conditions. They are located largely in the periphery of the settlements, in Maale Adumim and in what is known as the Jerusalem envelope, where the standard of living has improved precisely because of the erasure of the Green Line (and, I ask, not because of dispossessing the Palestinian residents of these areas and confiscating their lands in the first place?). These settlers would not agree to give up their economic achievements which would presumably be demanded of them as part of the peace plans supported by the liberal left. However, as Shenhav insists, not only socio-economic considerations underlie Mizrahi settlers positions. They share with most Mizrahim within the Green Line an ethnicArab identity, which would motivate them to celebrate a political settlement that opens the space. As proof of this assumption Shenhav recalls the joy felt by many Mizrahim when, following the 1967 war, a continuum in space between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river was created. This ended the separation enforced upon them by the Green Line: The 1967 war granted independence, status and possibilities for progress for an entire generation of Jews from Arab countries who celebrated the opening of the space. It permitted a renewed definition of the Mizrahi identity in Israel, not as an antithesis to the Ashkenazi identity, but as an option for integrating into the space, even though in this case the circumstances are those of an oppressive integration. (p 55) A group of Mizrahi intellectuals who define themselves as Arab Jews shared the celebration of this open space with the Mizrahi public. Shenhav quotes the Jewish Israeli author of Iraqi origin Shimon Balas, who immediately after the end of the war wrote: A new wind is blowing in the land, the Eastern wind with one stroke, we have been ejected from our small, provincial and tangled world and have been confronted with our existential reality in the region past, present, and future. (p 56) Shenhavs own family and their friends developed connections with Arab singers and musicians soon after 1967, and celebrated the space which had been opened: Although they accepted the cosmology of the Green Line, they expanded its margins. And here comes a list of names of the Arab musicians with whom they sang and played music in parties, cafs and private homes and imagined their past in the Arab countries (p 56). All this joy when the 1948 occupation of Palestine was completed by the 1967 occupation with many of its inhabitants expelled, becoming refugees for the second time, not to mention the lethal blow dealt to the Palestinian national movement. Again, you would expect a progressive sociologist such as Shenhav sharply to criticise both Mizrahi Jews and those Palestinian musicians who partied together in these wine and roses gatherings. But as critical authors such as Aijaz Ahmad and Eric Hobsbawm have 21 emphasised, identity politics do not sustain solidarity with
21. Aijaz Ahmad, Culture, Nationalism and the Role of the Intellectuals: An Interview, Lineages of the Present (Tulika, New Delhi, 1996), pp 396-428; Eric Hobsbawm, Identity Politics and 16
other identity groups. It seems that self-proclaimed Arab Jews are not an exception to this rule. Shenhav shares the labelling of Mizrahim as Arab Jews with other Mizrahi intellectuals who are proponents of 22 identitarian ideology. However, as Ein-Gil and Machover correctly point out, this labelling of Mizrahim as Arab Jews is erroneous: Of course, we are not questioning the right of any individual to self-identify as an Arab Jew if s/he feels inclined to do so. But there is no justification for thrusting this label upon the mass of Mizrahim, who do not choose to identify themselves as Arab, and who would at best regard this label as alien to their self-identity. Hence, they argue: the felt cultural affinity of individuals has never had any relevance to an Arab ethnic/national identity. On the contrary, even Mizrahim who took part in violent uprisings against their discrimination, except for the Black Panthers in 1971, have not connected their opposition to solidarity with the oppressed 23 Palestinians in Israel. Since 1977 the Mizrahim have for the most part supported the right en masse, be it the secular Likud or the Mizrahi Shas movement, which has gradually become a most extreme racist party. Religious Democratic Settlers are the second constituency that allegedly has the potential to initiate a just political solution which would erase the Green Line. Despite the fact that they live in religious settlements on the West Bank, most of which are dedicated to the Greater Land of Israel, they are according to Shenhav candidates for a promising solution to the conflict. Thus, he cites the Rabbi of the notorious Ofra settlement, for example, as someone who does not see in separation as such a solution, and who claims that the rights of Palestinians to self-determination as well as the refugee question should be considered. Consistent with his systematic ignoring of the ideologies of his would-be partners to peace, Shenhav disregards the fact that such a search for a more humane solution would still be based on the religious belief in the Promised Land as divinely ordained, and would still refuse to give up the right to live on stolen Palestinian lands. Moreover, in accord with his identity ideology, Shenhav adopts a position which can easily be construed as attributing great significance to a religious dimension of the conflict which presumably the liberal left, because of its secularism, is unable to entertain: One can understand the price of secularism attached to the 1967 Paradigm. Such a position misses the fact that the great majority of the population
the Left, New Left Review, no 17, May-June 1996, pp 38-47. 22. See Dodin and Chetrit, Culture Identity and Boarders: An Israeli Poet and Author Sami Shalom Chetrit on Israeli and Arab Jewish Identity, http//tinurl.com/5288va, 2004; Smadar Lavie, Colonialism and Imperialism: Zionism, Encyclopaedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Volume 6 (Brill, Leiden, 2007). 23. Ehud Ein-Gil and Mosh Machover, Zionism and Oriental Jews: Dialectic of Exploitation and Cooptation, Race and Class, Volume 50, no 3, 2009, pp 62-76.
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River Jewish and Palestinian alike is not secular and is not satisfied with a mechanical solution of sovereignty which lacks a theological content. (p 26) Shenhavs disregard for Palestinian national identity leads him to the conclusion that only a cooperation between religious settlers and religious Palestinians may open the way to reach a genuine solution a way which was blocked until now by the secularism of the left. V: The Solution Shenhav firmly objects to the dismantling of most of the settlements in the framework of a solution which would open the space for Jews and Palestinians alike. The Immorality of Dismantling the Settlements: Shenhav first criticises the position of the liberal left whose demand to evacuate the settlements represents a quest for an atonement for the 1948 Nakba. Again, this portrayal of the Zionist left is entirely misleading. Left governments in the 1990s and especially after Oslo doubled the settlements in the West Bank; in the current decade, under the various right-wingLabour coalition governments, not a single outpost on the West Bank, not to mention settlements, was ever dismantled (except for the withdrawal from Gaza). However, in his effort to whitewash the settlers sins, Shenhav quotes with sympathy the right-wing author Eyal Meged: Today one can tell the settlers: In the eyes of the left you had a big historic role to be the sanitary workers who cleanse their conscience. You were forced to take upon yourselves the mission of cleansing the conscience of those who live in Arab homes and on their lands [within the Green Line]. And Shenhav adds: The Rabbi of Ofra, Avi Giser, said in regards to this idea that on every [destroyed Arab] village a kibbutz resides, but the settlements [in the 1967 Occupied Territories] are more moral because they dont reside on any Palestinian village. (p 108, emphasis added) According to Shenhav, the demand to dismantle the settlements is not only unrealistic because of the settlers objection to it, but it is also immoral: Is an [Israeli] government allowed to renounce its responsibility towards 120 000 of its citizens? Is it permitted to uproot their life project and its meaning I am not sure that it is moral to evacuate generations of people who live there. I dont think that you need to correct one injustice by another injustice. (p 112) This fait accompli approach, which has prevailed among the Zionist left intellectuals with regard to the robbery of Palestinian lands inside Israel, is now being adopted by Shenhav in order to justify the settling of the 1967 Occupied Territories as well. He is even optimistic about the the Palestinians agreeing that the majority of the settlements should remain. In the above mentioned interview with Tom Segev, Shenhav was asked: Do you think that there are [Palestinian] partners to this demand? What Palestinian would agree
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to a political solution which does not include the dismantling of the settlements? Shenhavs evasive answer was: If a reciprocal demand would enable a kind of land swap, I cannot see any specific reason not to leave the settlements there. Excluding the just position of the Palestinian national movement and its authentic representatives is indeed appalling. There is ample evidence for their call for dismantling the settlements as a condition to any peace agreement. No doubt Shenhav is aware, for example, of the 2006 document by Palestinian prisoners of all political factions (except for the Islamic Jihad), which was later endorsed in a meeting of all Palestinian parties including Hamas! In ignoring the positions of genuine, popular Palestinian organisations, Shenhav in fact recognises only those elements within the Palestinian Authority that collaborate with Israel and the Shabak in oppressing their own people under the supervision of US General Danton. Indeed, no one before Shenhav among those who call for a just solution has dared to make the settlements kosher. He, however, does so with no less hypocrisy than that of the Zionist left which calls for the dismantling of the settlements in the framework of a two-state solution. His call for leaving the settlers where they are is made in the name of values of humanism and equality. Yet he misleadingly claims the consent of the Palestinians to this solution, without specifying their identity and without noting those Palestinians betrayal of their national cause. The deception of the reader reaches its climax when Shenhav empties the very notion of the 1967 Occupation from its colonising essence: There is a need to cut the Gordian knot between Occupation and Settling. (p 113) Thus, he finds it possible to propose a magic solution which apparently ends the Occupation without doing away with its central characteristic the colonisation of Palestine. A Single Open Space of Multiple Small Cantons Religious, Civic, National: The very call for the right of the settlements to remain is part of a solution which lacks any vision of ideological and political transformation on the side of Israelis as a condition for building a genuine democratic movement. Shenhav does not call for a popular joint struggle of Israelis and Palestinians or even of Mizrahim and Palestinians to do away with the Zionist colonial regime and its role as the enforcer of US imperial interests in the region. On the contrary, his analysis does not presuppose the need to depart from Zionism as a condition for a genuine solution. Instead, he suggests a gradual, step-bystep process: It would have to begin with a certain synchronisation of historic perceptions between Jews and Arabs. It does not necessitate abandoning national or theological perceptions of time, but it does necessitate producing additional time which would enable us to live together, a time that has spatial aspects. (p 150, emphasis added) As mentioned above, Shenhav is satisfied with objections to the Green Line as an adequate common denominator for the variety of social classes and groups that would build the new Israeli left, and which are united by their commitment to this new democracy. Accordingly, the main dividing line in Israels political map would be between democrats and anti-democrats among both old right and left.
The new democrats believe in the partition of a single space in contradiction to the barren solution of two states (p 154). Justice, according to Shenhav, is thus achieved by denying both the colonialists and the colonised the possibility to implement their presumed equal rights in the form of a sovereign state, be it one bi-national state, two states or a secular democratic state. In keeping with his post-modern perspective, Shenhav presents his theory-based explanation for the obsolescence of past forms of state sovereignty. The state in general, Israel included, is now systematically being fragmented: The state today, including Israel, splits sovereignties, privatises state institutions, and transfers loyalties to a third party. (p 158) The preferred model for Shenhav is what he names a Consociational Democracy which avoids any form of state sovereignty: the national and religious rights of the two peoples would be expressed by means of a partition of the space into small national spaces and into religious and civic communities in the form of cantons which retain their independence and are associated only in a loose structure. (p 156) These sovereign or municipal communities, scattered throughout Mandate Palestine, would be founded at agreed-upon places according to the holiness and history of the place, including the Jewish history in Israel since 1948 (p 151, emphasis added). The 1948 Arabs Palestinian citizens of Israel would be recognised as a national collective in places within Israel with an Arab majority and with a territorial continuum (p 150). A joint constitutional court would decide in cases of disagreements, while adhering to the fundamental law according to which one wrong should not be corrected by means of creating new ones (p 151). In other words, in the framework of Shenhavs preferred model for a political solution, the plentiful wrongs committed against Palestinians since 1948 would be erased and forgiven. Moreover, Nationalism/Zionism is reduced to one of the many different identities among Jews and Palestinians. It may find its expression in permitting large communities to retain their uni-national character, if they demand it. The 1948 Palestinians are thus invited to constitute a separate canton alongside the variety of cantons throughout Mandate Palestine which would be granted autonomy on the basis of their different identities: religious, civic and also national should the inhabitants demand it. Already now it is possible to start negotiations, he says, with the Palestinian minority within the Green Line, aiming to establish an interim bi-national model which would be anchored in an official constitution in the framework of a later comprehensive settlement. Shenhav disregards entirely the demands of the Palestinians within Israel to recognise them as part of the entire
Palestinian people and the Arab nation as a whole. Blocking the ever-strengthening relations with their brethren in the Arab world has become the target of the persecution of Palestinian leaders in Israel. Following the false accusation of Dr Azmi Bishara in 2007 of betraying state security, two other leaders are now being accused of establishing a connection with Hezbollah: the internationally-renowned pharmacologist Dr Omar Said and Ameer Makhoul. Makhoul is the chair of Ittijah (the umbrella organisation of Palestinian NGOs in Israel) and the head of the Popular Committee for the Defence of Political Freedoms in the Follow-Up Committee. Before being detained, he disclosed in a letter to Electronic Intifada (4 May 2010) the real reasons behind the authorities persecution of Palestinian leaders: The repression is meant to divide us, but it has had the opposite effect. We, Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Diaspora are only more determined and united to claim our rights and to build a nation where we can live in freedom and have equal rights. Israel is intimidating us because we are reasserting our communitys stake in the Palestinian struggle. Twenty years ago few considered the Palestinians in Israel as a part of the Palestinian people or the Palestinian cause. During the Oslo process of the 1990s, we were considered an internal problem for Israel to deal with, but our networking, advocacy and lobbying has changed this. Israel is increasingly repressing us to divide Palestinians from each other and isolate us from the outside world. One cannot but conclude that Shenhav not only disregards the Palestinian desire for national unity which was foreclosed by 1948 the point zero which determined all developments thereafter. His model for a resolution also furthers the division that had been forced at that time upon the Palestinian people but now under the misleading concept of one space, in which they would be fragmented into national or other civic and religious communities. Shenhavs model for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacks any vision which includes the resistance of the Palestinians as an anti-colonial struggle that is worthy of solidarity on the part of Israeli progressives. Replacing Palestinian nationhood and Zionist colonialism with identity politics results not only in a lack of solidarity with the Palestinian cause as articulated and defined by the Palestinian themselves; Shenhavs book also demonstrates a case in which a post-Zionist scholar, working within an identitarian framework, ends up in one camp with the most reactionary political forces among both Israelis and Palestinians. Inevitably, the collaborationist forces among the Palestinians are the allies of those who refuse explicitly to disconnect from Zionism and its US imperialist backing. Yehuda Shenhavs book is the ultimate proof of this contention.
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Carr Rouge
Thinking About Communism

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OR over two years militants belonging to the collectives publishing Contre Courant, Carr Rouge and Lmancipation Sociale, or grouped around the review lEncontre, have met at fairly regular intervals to work on the question of the topicality of communism. The following text was distributed among them on the eve of a meeting held in May 2006 in Nyons in Switzerland. Considerably amended and shortened, it served as a basis for the composition of the declaration of intent of the review Carr RougeLa Brche (No 1, October-December 2007). This joint work has subsequently been interrupted as a result of political problems; nevertheless many militants are convinced of the urgent need for it to be resumed. This article has been translated from the French by Harry Ratner. *** We militants who publish A Contre-Courant, Carr Rouge, LEmancipation Sociale or who are linked to the website A LEncontre of Switzerland have decided to pool our efforts in theoretical and political work on the current relevance of communism. We have decided to establish contacts with those who pursue a similar objective and to propose common work or more frequent contact. The present text is aimed at explaining what has driven us to this. The idea that unites us is that the aim of political activity is social emancipation, which is synonymous with human emancipation. Understood as collective selfemancipation, basing itself on self-activity and selforganisation, its objective is the construction of a world society without class divisions and in which the state has been dismantled. Today this aim as the goal of political activity has become increasingly distant within the milieu in which it was born the working-class movement. Whilst it underlies the commitment of many participants in the Social Forums, their aspirations have been marginalised and frustrated. The language of realism, that is, of adaptation to capitalism, has prevailed. In the imperialist countries, the aim of social emancipation remains inscribed in the programmes of various organisations and political groups and parties, but merely in a formal and desiccated form. The aims of social emancipation communism must not be monopolised by self-proclaimed vanguards. They must be made to live and be nourished through a process of interaction with the continually renewed self-activity of the exploited, a self-activity which modifies the conditions of struggle and in so doing changes human beings. The historical experience of what are called concrete attempts at transition to socialism needs to be analysed in depth, an analysis that has hardly yet started. As distant heirs, but heirs nevertheless, of those who faced Stalinist repression, executions and the Gulag, we are fully aware of
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this need. But this concerns the present as well as the past. What makes this work necessary are the new challenges posed to humanity by the private ownership of the means of production. We wish to participate with all those whose political commitment is based on this aim in a collective effort to (re)think the communism of today and show its relevance and necessity. This requires that we put aside any differences which might exist amongst those who want to undertake this task. The daily concrete struggles in which everyone engages can only enrich the discussions. However, it is a matter of urgency to devote a part of ones time and energy to this politico-theoretical task. The daily struggles carry within them an aspiration to another society, to something beyond capitalism; they strive, more or less consciously, to build a bridge to this new society. These struggles will be disarmed if we do not define the direction in which this bridge is to be built. Socialism or Barbarism It has been nearly a century since the concept of the choice between socialism or barbarism was first formulated. The alarm cry uttered by Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionaries expressed a radical modification of the basis of the struggle for social emancipation, from outlining and preparing the way for historical progress, to opposing immediate deadly perils. The idea of the construction of socialism and the image of humanity marching towards progress that was propagated by Stalinism and its derivatives has prevented this alarm cry from being fully understood. Some have tried to dissociate an understanding of Auschwitz from the history of capitalism and its convulsions. Others have tried to convince us that the military and nuclear dominance of the United States guarantees liberty and democracy. We must, today, return in all its meaning to the cry of socialism or barbarism. Capitalism has created the conditions not merely for deadly competition between one country and another, but also competition amongst workers within each national economy for the sale of their labour power. The unity of workers at all levels has become an absolutely central requirement of militant activity. This unity is the sole means by which workers can overcome the dangers that face them, and by which they can proceed to more permanent solutions to their problems. We consider that this unity could be built on the convergence of the manifestations of self-activity in which the dispossessed and the exploited are engaged in every country, every village, every town and every region. It is within this context that one must place the decay of the bourgeois state in many countries (amongst others,
those of the periphery) and the loss of credibility and legitimacy of the supposedly representative and democratic institutions of the imperialist countries. The Ecological Question Humanity in the twenty-first century faces an exceptionally serious global ecological crisis. All serious commentators fear it will exacerbate militarism, and increase threats that might develop to the use of nuclear arms (be they miniaturised or so-called tactical). During the course of the twentyfirst century the alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism, but between communism and one form or another of total destruction. Approached on a planetary scale, the ecological question becomes inseparable from the social question. Behind the words ecology and environment stands nothing less than the rapidly approaching question of the survival of the conditions for the social reproduction of classes or social strata, of peoples, and even of entire countries. Revolutionaries have not addressed the question of humanitys relationship with nature with a political and social critique as profound as they have provided in respect of the exploitation of the proletariat. They share this indifference to the problems of the world ecosystem with the managers of financial capital and the planners of actually existing socialism. The warnings about the emission of greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2, and climate change over the last 20 years have not been heeded. The anarchy of capitalist production, the realisation of surplus value that implies the necessity of selling commodities and therefore wasting resources and incorporating China and India, following Latin America and South-East Asia, into the civilisation of the motor car, of urbanisation (regardless of the effects upon the land), all this creates a situation characterised by an increasing loss of control by governments. The destruction of the ecological balance and of the resources necessary for life is accelerating. In East Africa and Andean America climatic warming and the water crisis are becoming inextricably entwined. The consciousness of this threat amongst the currents claiming to be revolutionary socialist has been belated and insufficient, as has been their political and social resistance to it. Light-mindedness or frivolity on this matter is no longer acceptable. The idea of communism and its necessity must be considered within the conditions in which these questions must be answered. What steps, what measures are needed? The workers, the huge social bloc whose contours are visible in the various resistance struggles concerning the ownership of the resources of their countries Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru impose the rules and the necessary measures through their self-activity, and as they themselves implement and/or control these activities. Competition Amongst Workers Workers in all countries suffer the increasingly brutal effects of liberalisation and the deregulation of foreign investment. The workers of the countries where pension funds by capitalisation prevail Chile, Argentina, USA, United Kingdom, for example cannot escape the threat to their standard of living. In these countries capital shows no gratitude to those whose savings feed the financial markets, and it attacks them as much if not more than other workers.
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Those who draw their wealth from this process can see that although it is still incomplete, this challenge is already far advanced. Its most novel and dramatic consequence is to allow capital to organise, on a continental scale, direct competition between workers, sellers of their labour power. In Asia, towards which a large part of world industrial capacity has been transferred, capital pits its workers in direct competition amongst themselves at the same time as using them as weapons against the level of wages and working conditions of other workers in most other parts of the world. The development of information technology has been deliberately manipulated by industrial groups, with the help of governments, and has provided capital with the technical conditions for the optimisation of production and profit, on the basis of the dispersion, flexibility and increasing precariousness of the workers conditions. The lengthening of the working day and increasing physical and mental exhaustion of the workforce are two expressions of the increasing super-exploitation which combines traits of both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The hundreds of people who drown crossing the Mediterranean or who perish on the frontier between the USA and Mexico symbolise the barbarity of a labour market that is structured by the laws of unequal and combined development of twenty-first century imperialism. Capitalism Means War The question of war, the central theme of the alternatives socialism or barbarism a century ago, and which has in fact been one of the major expressions of barbarism throughout the twentieth century, remains as topical today as in the epoch when Jean Jaurs first uttered this phrase. The demonstrations of 15 February 2003 against the invasion of Iraq by the USA, Britain and their allies was the highest surge of the anti-globalist and alternative-globalist movement born with the world-wide Social Forum movement of 2001 in the wake of Seattle. The consideration of the relevance of communism at the beginning of the twenty-first century implies a specific task: we cannot act as if the question of war has been settled. The need to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has driven US capital (along with European Union and Japanese capital) to allow the Chinese bureaucraticcapitalist lite to carry out the capitalist transformation of China within the space of 10 years when it would have taken several decades on its own, even with the help of the Chinese diaspora and Taiwan. By putting a powerful rival in the saddle, US capital has recreated the possibility of a classic inter-imperialist conflict. The nuclear arms race (which now seeks, for example, to miniaturise the bombs) has restarted. The conflicts which can result from the biggest ecological threats to the conditions of reproduction of entire peoples will provoke a return to war by the states most involved in the preservation of the social and political order based on the private ownership of the means of production. The Emancipation of Women The emancipation of women is at the heart of social emancipation. Since time immemorial, an inferior status one that is presented as natural has been imposed on women. Capitalist globalisation both preserves archaic forms of
exploitation and oppression of the large majority of women, and renews and recreates them, suited to the needs of capital. Today the majority of the worlds women experience living conditions which include extreme poverty and exploitation, with their being confined to factories furnishing the consumer goods markets of the metropolitan countries, facing daily violence, and having a status of migrants deprived of everything and for many semi-slavery or actual slavery. The urgency of their liberation from both patriarchal and class domination is the measure of the difficulties they have to face. Individual and collective emancipation in the sense of opposition to the specific forms of domination and oppression is inscribed in the struggle for their universal right to be free human beings. Women not only are engaged in waged work, to this is added the time involved in the personal care of children, husband and family; this comprises womens total work-time. Today, in the older capitalist countries where progress had been made to alleviate this dependence, its new extent is increased by the threat to the existence of such institutions as nurseries and kindergartens, or the failure to provide elementary necessities. On a world scale, not only do the struggles of women in their varied forms become part of the process of selfactivity tending towards collective self-emancipation, but they are its central component. The various movements of womens struggle and emancipation contribute to the battles for the survival of a section of humanity. These actions are an integral part of a more general movement of the exploited and oppressed against barbarism and for the future socialist society. Todays Theoretical and Political Challenges Our initiative stems from the conviction that in the actual relationship of forces between the classes and under the impact of the many-faceted offensive of capital, a strategy of trying to maintain what exists that is, in general, the gains of previous struggles is no longer sufficient. The purely defensive stance, adopted, in the best cases, by what remains of the working-class movement, seems doomed to failure. The mobilisations aiming to halt redundancies and attacks on living standards and employment pensions confront the means that the employers and their governments possess for enforcing their onslaught; primarily through their ability to play off workers in one country against those in another. In any case, the best of cases remains the exception. The trade union organisations are marked by the conviction that neo-liberal globalisation is irreversible. They can therefore only retreat, if not deliberately oppose the construction of a general movement of opposition to capital. Their first step in this direction is to isolate struggles wherever they occur. One of the consequences of this is the spread amidst wage earners of a narrow sense of anger and disillusion, which is exploited by the forces of conservatism and capital. This double reaction is not the product of simple objective sociological factors. It is largely the result of the refusal by the trade union bureaucracies to enter into open conflict with the ruling class and their direct political representatives, and thus participate in the social, economic, political and cultural struggle which would allow workers to map out a different future for themselves and their children something that they increasingly feel is necessary.
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Only revolutionaries can help workers and, more generally, the exploited to overcome the weakness, indeed the impotence, of their responses to the general offensive of the capitalists and governments. As neither the parties that claim to represent them nor the trade union bureaucracies help the workers to understand the current situation, it is up to the anti-capitalists to compensate for the absence of any overall political project capable of providing a coherent and credible alternative to capitalism. By its becoming increasingly obvious and stronger, the violent nature of social relations makes the (re)construction of a class identity more necessary and also more realisable. This can arise in response to the gaping inequalities and exploitation and nourish itself in the struggles and selfactivity of the producers of social wealth. True, the numerical growth, on a world scale, of the working class does not automatically make it inherently subversive or capable of engaging in a process of radical change. But there is no shortage of examples to highlight the fact that in the course of mobilisations of sufficient amplitude and during struggles marked by direct action, we can detect a unifying dynamism which breaks down the multiple differences in status within the proletariat erected by human resources managers. These unifying dynamisms are reinforced when they obtain support from democratic self-organisation and when social and political forces feed the relationships between spontaneous or semi-spontaneous movements and aid the emergence of a consciousness which can measure up to the obstacles and objectives that are confronted in these struggles. This is all the more so if those involved in them draw upon the historical memories of struggles in any particular country or region. The consolidation of wage earners into a class is facilitated. They transform themselves into a proletariat in struggle. The starting point of an alternative orientation must be rooted in the strengthening of the capacity of wage earners to act in unity. The social democratic parties which claim to represent the workers politically exploit, in the same way as the bourgeoisie, the results of struggles fought in the name of communism in the twentieth century and of the mass crimes committed in that name. They sing that capitalism has won, and that the only road that can therefore be followed is that of the best possible adaptation to it. Private ownership of the means of production would eventually be tempered, but in no way abolished. Paralysed by their role in the history of State Socialism in the Soviet Union and in the genesis of todays political relationships it suffices to recall the roles of the Communist Party of France in 1968, of Italy in 1969-70, of Spain in the restoration of the Spanish monarchy what remains of the old communist parties adhere to social democracy. Each in its own particular way, they have become modernised social democratic parties, as in Italy; or their alliance with social democracy is a key factor in their survival, as in France. Although they have always retained a certain continuity with their Stalinist past, when splits occur in these parties they rapid evolve towards reformism, historically known as Eurocommunism, as with the Party of Communist Reformation in Italy. Their militants are still attached to the idea more or less nostalgic, but sometimes trying to be revitalised of communism. But it is not from these parties that one can expect the construction of an alternative that is inspired by the idea that communism is a conceivable, realistic, living option. And
one must never forget that, beyond their important sociopolitical evolution of these recent decades, the social democratic and so-called communist parties have always had in common a strategy based upon the state rather than upon the self-activity of the workers and their allies. Since the end of the 1990s, the anti-globalist or alternative-globalist movements have sought to deal with problems faced by the most exploited and most deprived sectors of the worlds population. These movements have provided a context within which militants have been able to tackle the problems ignored or rejected by both the political parties that claim to represent the workers and the trade union bureaucracies. Often, fortified by fixed attitudes and with more material means than other currents, the currents opposed to neo-liberalism have set limits on these discussions. As a result theoretical political work, in so far as it has been able to develop in the last decade within the Social Forums, remains lacking relative to the scope and social nature of the problems. At best, those currents opposed to neo-liberalism will transform themselves and this has already partly occurred into a new, classically social democratic reformism with all its characteristic impotence. At worst, it risks weakening the resistance of the oppressed by nourishing illusions. In a word, it does not suffice to declare that the world is not a commodity and to protest against the commoditisation of the world as well as the transformation of commodity into a world of its own. One must identify and defeat the relationships of production which govern this universal commoditisation. This recognition, with the resulting debates, exchanges and differentiations, is in the process of being born within the World Social Forums and other fields. Some currents and forces are beginning to aim at surmounting the limits fixed by a narrow opposition to neo-liberalism without falling back on stereotypical archaisms. Some militant groups believe that having an answer for the degeneration of the Russian Revolution an answer which they consider to be the key that can explain all the defeats and/or degenerations that have followed absolves them from the necessity of thinking about the actual problems of communism. For them, the old revolutionary model remains intact, requiring at most some minor tinkering. We hope to convince our readers that one cannot act as if the idea of communism (or of socialism in the full sense of the term, which is synonymous with communism) has emerged unscathed from the history of the twentieth century. It is also very wrong to adopt the idea that in todays world, with its all-encompassing domination of finance capital, it is unnecessary to reconsider meticulously the necessity for communism and what communism actually represents. The great importance that we attach to workers selfactivity impels us to distance ourselves from substitutionism. This affects, in different degrees, both small political groups and the bigger anti-capitalist organisations claiming to be Marxist. In these organisations a recognition of the need for work of a programmatic character which deals with at least some of the questions which we have raised, sometimes coexists with a rush towards pragmatism and activism which often puts them in danger of being dragged in the wake of the social democratic parties, the vestiges of Stalinist parties and sometimes the trade union bureaucracies. We hope to convince the militants who understand the nature and necessity of our project to participate in it.
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On our part, we shall be very attentive to all proposals for regroupment which work towards this aim. Thinking About Communism Today The brutal blows inflicted on daily basis by capital against the vast majority of waged workers, the marginal urban strata and the peasant masses throughout the world, as well as the radical nature of the neo-liberal project, constitute an attack of an intensity that has not been experienced for decades. Capital intends to wipe out most of the gains secured over the years by the working-class movement and other organised social forces. In Europe an oft-heard remark expresses awareness of this: Our children will have a harder life than we, and it will be even worse for our grandchildren. This is what obliges those whose aim is social emancipation to begin to respond by establishing dialogues and widespread cooperation at the levels posed by these attacks. Faced with this global disruption is it not time merely to reaffirm, but also to rethink, the most radical perspective historically brought to bear on the class struggle of the proletariat, that of communism, in order to determine the actual conditions of its necessity and feasibility. (Let us repeat; if some prefer the term socialism, we shall not object.) We do not ignore the immense theoretical and political problems posed by this project. On the contrary. In all our theoretical and political efforts in our meetings and seminars and on our website we will seek to formulate these problems and the conditions for their solution as clearly as possible. The Concept of Communism We need to establish a starting point for defining the actual concept of communism. Among these problems the first, and by no means the least, is the ignominy into which even the term communism has fallen following on the disastrous historical experience of Stalinism and the balance sheet of the states of so-called actually existing socialism. In the media, but also among many intellectuals, the term totalitarianism is used to discredit any communist project. Thus our first objective will be clearly to define or to redefine the concept itself of communism in all its varied aspects and dimensions. To start this work and provide a basis for agreement, and without prejudging the results of the work and research that we and others will undertake, we shall define communism as: 1. A society based on a) the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and consumption, b) democratic planning of social production aimed at satisfying the whole of social needs, and c) the self-management of production units within this socialised framework; creating the platform for a profound change in the management of the worlds natural resources and the introduction of measures to safeguard the reproduction of conditions for life on the planet. 2. A society in which the administration of social power (in the sense of the capacity of society to act on itself: to provide itself with its own organisational and functional framework) takes the form of deliberative and executive organs encompassing all those affected by the decisions to be taken and preventing any monopolisation of these organs by a minority, however enlightened. This supposes the abolition of a state raised above society, and
its absorption into democratic self-governing organs of society, as these are the necessary preconditions for its complete subordination to society. 3. A society consequently freed from all oppressive relationships, those of capital and the state with all their apparatuses; a society in which class division and divisions between governors and governed have been overcome; a society in which the free association of individuals implies, on one hand, that they control their products, which are no longer commodities, and, on the other, that the voluntary union of producers with their means of production puts an end to the status of the waged worker, or wage-slave. 4. A society in which the free exchange of activities between social individuals supports the free development of every person, which in turn becomes the condition for the free development of all and vice versa; a society which puts an end to all types of oppression, in particular that of women; a society which organises the distribution of work-time and free time so that the latter grows qualitatively in relation to the time necessary for the provision of the most varied needs. 5. A society, therefore, in which humankind tends towards reconciliation with itself, while aware that from its establishment new contradictions and new conflicts will arise, whose resolution will presuppose the creation of institutions consistent with each stage in the evolution of society. The History of the Struggle for Communism Without neglecting the new problems that will arise, redefining communism itself is insufficient to combat the ignominy which today surrounds the word. We must once more return to the history and even the pre-history of communism, of the long struggle of the oppressed to emancipate themselves and create the conditions for a community free from all oppression. It is not only a question of recalling the glorious pages of this history, nowadays lost in oblivion or knowingly distorted, of recalling the ideological works, the movements, groups and people who were the most prominent actors. We must, above all, reopen the dark pages, examine the bloody defeats which punctuated this history, the worst being that which saw the emancipatory movement of the proletariat turning against itself, creating new regimes of oppression and new structures of exploitation. We must re-engage in the debates which have throughout agitated the communist movement and led to its division into rival tendencies and exhaustion in fratricidal struggles. Obviously this return to the history of the movement is not conceived in a purely historiographical perspective. It is relative to the problems which the movement faces today, here and now, that this return must be made. For the central axis of our work must be to affirm the relevance and necessity of the communist perspective. This relevance is justified not only by the extent and depth of the actual contradictions of capitalism and the crises in which these contradictions are expressed, but also by the potential for social transformation that these crises create. Communism as a Necessity Communism is a necessity that arises from the crisis of
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humankind. The third axis of our work will consist of methodically analysing the contradictions and potential that this crisis presents. Within these perspectives, for reasons which we have started to explain above, we propose to pay particular attention to: 1. The potentially catastrophic world ecological crisis. We shall document the degree attained on a world scale by the contradiction between the socialisation of the productive forces (which include natural resources and scientific knowledge) and their private appropriation under the form of capital a contradiction which more than ever makes its ending a real possibility. We shall examine the actual forms of the fusion of science and capital. We shall show how the appropriation of socialised work as a whole by capital (including scientific and technical advances) is an obstacle to the potentially profound changes in the organisation of industrial and agricultural production and distribution. Without a sharp social, economic and political break, the technical innovations that have become necessary as an initial response to definite aspects of the ecological crisis will not be brought to fruition nor those that could be made in the management of the environment, the organisation of work, housing and transport. 2. The increasing disparity of development between continents, regions and nations in the new phase of world capitalism that is driven by finance capital and transnational enterprises. At one pole, there is an increase in both the world proletariat and the industrial reserve army that is either irregularly employed or unemployed. Millions of individuals are condemned to poverty and social marginalisation. At the other pole, wealth continues to accumulate and with it the diversion of human and technical resources which could be used to free humankind from need and obsolete forms of labour towards the reproduction of domination, social surveillance and war. 3. The globalisation (the transnationalisation) of capital and capitalism which tends to abolish the old political and cultural divisions into nation-states and stages of civilisation (not without provoking crises of identity). At the same time, it lays the basis for the transformation of humankind into a political community. 4. The increasingly contradictory socialisation of individuals; their increasing exposure at an earlier age to the cultures of the entire world, past and present, the product of the whole of humanity. This is an exposure which comes into contradiction with the increasing loss of control of individuals over their material, institutional and cultural conditions of existence; a loss which tends to deprive them of the ability to create for themselves a stable life, to communicate with others and participate in the construction of the world and to contest its present direction thus depriving them of an important part of the potential richness mentioned above. It is a contradictory socialisation which results in a loss of orientation for the immense majority in so far as it infers a profound anthropological change affecting people, their relation to society and their ability to act on it. Self-Activity and Self-Emancipation But the relevance of communism must also some would
say above all be understood in relation to the challenges and potential of its dynamic principle: the self-activity of the proletariat. This is both the lever of transformation and the basic rule of the envisaged society of the future. More than ever before it is important to proclaim that the emancipation of the workers will be the act of the workers themselves. Firstly, in the light of past experience, all the models of socialism based on substitutionist and messianic relationships, on a self-proclaimed vanguard of the proletariat, have failed to allow the working class to emancipate itself. They have, at best, managed momentarily to lighten the weight of capitalist oppression in this or that country, before leading to new forms of domination and oppression, and, ultimately, a return to capitalism. Emancipation is not granted, it is won. Secondly, in the light of present-day experience, it becomes increasingly clearer that in the actual phase of class struggle the workers and other exploited social strata can count only on themselves, not only to defend themselves from the general offensive of capital, but also in trying to guarantee the basic conditions of social reproduction. The countries of Latin America, and also Russia, are already examples of this, but the same processes are at work in Asia and partially in Africa. In the old capitalist countries, workers self-activity is the only means to defend past gains, taking into consideration that what remains of the trade union and political apparatuses of the old workers movement (social democracy and the various avatars of Stalinism, subsequently renamed Eurocommunism) have transformed themselves into organs of capitalism, competing over how to get the workers to accept a worsening of their conditions. Reaffirming the self-activity of the proletariat as the main asset of communism obviously implies explaining oneself on this point as on all others, that is, without neglecting the theoretical and political problems that it raises. We do not intend to transform this idea into a generous but abstract utopia, cut off from the conditions required for its realisation, or into a prophecy of an hypothetical bright future. This comes down firstly to guarding against all forms of spontaneism. For us the self-activity of the proletariat is always the result of a relationship of forces in the class struggle, always the fragile and therefore reversible result of a struggle in which the proletariat confronts not only its class enemies but also itself. It presupposes organisational forms that are able to meet these challenges, among which organised political forces have an effective role. For the workers are affected by the class domination they suffer and therefore by the organised political intrusion of this domination within their ranks and also by the internalisation of these relations of domination. In this sense, the development of the self-activity of the proletariat presupposes at least the partial breakdown of the attitudes, values and ideas daily implanted in them by the manifold aspects of this domination. Nevertheless we think that this self-activity of the proletariat is the essential means for disentangling the knot of contradictions and difficulties in which the workers throughout the world are entangled. We see this in the instances of resistance, even the smallest, in which the workers oppose their exploitation. We intend to pay particular attention to the manner in which in these often mun24
dane struggles workers start to recognise both the necessity and the possibility of a collective reappropriation of the social means of production and of new ways for living together. Within this perspective, and to tie in the reference to the self-activity of the proletariat to its immediate experience, we shall endeavour to understand how this selfactivity is simultaneously defeated and stimulated by the attacks of capital. One sees how the closing of factories and mass sackings provoke reactions about taking over the means of production; how privatisation leads in a contradictory fashion to a new approach to public services by workers and users; how the conditions imposed on immigrant workers and their families and the repression to which they are subjected provoke grass-roots movements in favour of rights for immigrant workers and a reciprocal understanding of different cultures; how the persistence and the worsening of famines go hand in hand with new demands for intelligent agricultural reforms; how the increasing hold of capital over natural resources arouses resistance, as in Ecuador and Bolivia, based on selforganisation and in which self-emancipation is at least the semi-conscious aim; how the severity of the oppression of women and their dual exploitation sees the birth and growth of movements of emancipation; and how the possibilities opened up by the internet immediately pose the question of freedom of access to cultural assets. We shall therefore call on both the work of sociologists, historians and anthropologists, and the accounts and analyses of militants who know how to take into account the presence of this element of self-activity in the proletariats daily and historical praxis and in the prospect of the realisation of communism which it opens up. We shall do all we can to involve in our discussion those whose research we shall hope to use. It follows from what has been said that the self-activity and even more so the self-emancipation of the proletariat must be understood as a long-term process which will involve both advances and retreats. With this perspective we intend at some time to again take up the debate on the mediations which must be part of this process: the programmatic mediations that permit the establishment of a link between the demands arising from actual struggles and the perspective of a communist society; and organisational mediations that permit the development of the embryos of self-activity present in the actual practices and struggle to the level of revolutionary breaks which makes selfemancipation possible. Here again we do not intend to conduct these discussions in a purely theoretical manner or only with reference to past historical experiences; we intend to take into account the actual situation confronting todays proletariat. Regroupment and Discussions From this text it will be understood that we wish to involve in this work all those, whatever their previous political trajectory, who recognise themselves in the name of communism or who perceive that its updated appropriation or reappropriation has become an unavoidable political necessity. This initiative flows from the conviction that with the unprecedented crisis into which the working-class movement has been plunged by the internationalisation of capi-
tal, the unfolding of neo-liberal politics, the end of the fordist compromise, the shameful rowdy rallying of social democrats and Eurocommunists to the neo-liberal paradigm and the political collapse of State Socialism after its ideological collapse, we have entered a new historical stage of the class struggle. This makes both possible and necessary a reappraisal of the divisions and splits inherited from previous stages of the working-class movement. Simply this is because the new stage has rendered obsolete (though in
an uneven way) all models of social transformation previously worked out at all levels of this movement. This new stage shows up the inadequacy of these models, and that their opposition to capital was only partial. It therefore makes possible previously improbable and even impossible regroupment and cooperation amongst individuals, groups, organisations and tendencies emerging from traditions which have up till now at best ignored and usually bitterly fought each other.
Harry Ratner
Comments on Thinking About Communism

The article below has been sent to the authors of Thinking About Communism as part of the anticipated discussion. *** I agree that defending what exists is not sufficient. Of course we must try to change society. But the struggle for what used to be called the maximum programme and the struggle for the minimum are not mutually exclusive. It is possible and necessary to defend existing past gains and indeed to achieve improvements. It is possible, even in todays conditions, successfully to oppose or reduce a cut in wages or benefits. This in itself reduces an increase in unhappiness. Also struggle itself enhances the self-esteem and sense of community of those involved and therefore creates a bit of happiness amid the gloom. Even charities such as Oxfam (much derided by revolutionaries and myself in the past as a means of making capitalism acceptable) do result in providing clean water and minimal health facilities. Surely better for African villagers than nothing while awaiting the millennium in x years time! Any improvements in conditions are worthwhile even if they do not go as far as the destruction of capitalism. For example, the campaign in the richer countries to reduce the debt repayments of the undeveloped countries a campaign carried out by a coalition of trade unions, radical groups, churches and charities, the campaign Make Poverty History did not, in the end, achieve very much. Debt was reduced marginally, and, no doubt, the corrupt politicians in the debtor countries put most of the extra money in their pockets, but at least some people will have been marginally better off and less unhappy. This does not mean that we should cease to work for a radical change in society for a transition towards socialism, eventually resulting in a new, happier society. But please, comrades, do not ignore any partial measures in the meanwhile that reduce misery and increase happiness if only for a few. Do not see struggles for immediate demands as only a means for increasing the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat in readiness for the ultimate struggle. In doing so, you only erect a barrier between yourselves and the workers and oppressed who are struggling. It is just not true that defensive struggles and those for partial demands, for improvements within capitalism, are all doomed to defeat. Reforms are desirable in themselves.
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NY attempt to have an open and comradely discussion about the problems facing communists and finding a way forward is to be welcomed especially if it is entered into with the intention of going beyond the arid sectarian factionalism which has so long bedevilled the movement. I agree with your statement that we have entered a new historical stage which makes possible previously improbable and even impossible regroupment and cooperation amongst individuals, groups, organisations and tendencies emerging from traditions which have up till now at best ignored and usually bitterly fought each other. It is in this spirit that I offer these comments. A Battle On Several Fronts We must consider the ultimate aim of political struggle, and propose a battle on several fronts. You write: The idea that unites us is that the aim of political activity is social emancipation, which is synonymous with human emancipation the construction of a world society without class divisions and in which the state has been dismantled. In other words, a communist society. But is communism an end in itself? My answer is no. Communism is only a means to an end. That end is the maximisation of happiness. In fact, that should be the purpose of all activity: political and non-political, personal and collective. Viewed in this light, I think your downgrading of the importance of purely defensive struggles and struggles for limited objectives is mistaken. You say: a strategy of trying to maintain what exists that is, in general, the gains of previous struggles is no longer sufficient. The purely defensive stance, adopted, in the best cases, by what remains of the working-class movement, seems doomed to failure.
A Feasible Alternative In general, the argument that the era of reforms within capitalism is past flows from the assumption that capitalism is in terminal crisis and has reached the absolute limit of growth; that production has bumped into a ceiling above which it cannot rise. This was the assumption on which Trotskys Transitional Programme of 1938 was based. The long postwar boom followed, during which world production reached new heights. It is just as false today. On the contrary, it is the untrammelled and unplanned growth of production, the waste of natural resources, that are rushing us headlong to ecological disasters that threaten civilisation. But in a contrary fashion, it also makes it possible on the basis of increased production (punctuated by recessions due to financial crises) for some workers to win, if only temporarily, improved wages and conditions; for some other sections of the population to win improvements in such things as health care, pensions, etc, or at the worst prevent their worsening. At the same time, it is necessary to fight for measures to reduce or reverse the impact on the climate and the environment created by this increased production and consumption. So a fight on two fronts is required. One front is to defend immediately the living standards of millions, the other front is to transform society so as to prevent ecological catastrophes and end poverty for ever. We agree that society needs to achieve control of production and economic decisions so that they meet human requirements without damaging the environment. Again we agree that this means taking absolute control away from capitalist owners and vesting control in the community. It was thought at one time by many that the way to do this was through a command economy. The Five-Year Plans of the Soviet Union actually existing socialism were hailed as the only possible alternative. As you rightly say, the historical experience of what are called concrete attempts at transition to socialism needs to be analysed in depth. But you are wrong in asserting that this has hardly yet started. Have you not read Trotskys voluminous writings, including The Revolution Betrayed; Emma Goldmans and other anarchist writings, Hillel Ticktins work, the Mensheviks critiques, Souvarines writings and much else? You do not elaborate on this subject. No doubt you intend to do so in the future or may have done so in other texts. May I also bring to your attention some things I and others said a few years ago about possible alternatives to the bureaucratic command economy of the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1989. In a series of articles in New Interventions State Ownership and the Transition to Socialism (Volume 4, no 1, 1993) and A Programme for the Left (Volume 7, no 3, 1997) I described an alternative way forward. In New Interventions, Volume 5, no 2, 1994, I reviewed Alec Noves The Economics of Feasible Socialism (Unwin Hyman, 1983) and Pat Devines Democracy and Economic Planning (Polity Press, 1988). Nove advocated a state-controlled banking system through which overall planning would be affected at the macro level by its allocation of capital, but retaining a market mechanism between autonomous enterprises at the micro level; and he envisaged a mix of forms of ownership: 1. State enterprises, centrally controlled and administered. 2. State-owned (or socially-owned) enterprises with full autonomy and a management responsible to the workforce.
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3. Cooperative enterprises. 4. Small-scale private enterprises, subject to clearly defined limits. 5. Individuals (for example, freelance journalists, plumbers, artists. All these would relate via market mechanisms within the macro plan. Devine rejected Noves market socialism and instead proposed a model of democratic planning based on negotiated coordination between socially-owned, self-governed production units within an overall plan worked out by an (obviously) democratically controlled state or administration. These articles may accessed by going to the website www.whatnextjournal.co.uk and clicking on the link Publications. One should also study the war economies during the Second World War, where the fact that the state was the main purchaser of most of national production, its introduction of price control, rationing and special taxation, and issuing of war bonds gave it great influence over the direction of the economy. In Britain a private enterprise had to apply to a Capital Issues Committee before it was allowed to expand an existing factory or build a new one. Permission was granted only if this was to produce needed armaments, military uniforms or civilian commodities within the rationing requirements. The system worked. It should be studied. It shows that in certain conditions the state, as it exists that is to say, a bourgeois state can impose significant constraints on a capitalist economy and direct it to specific ends; true, in this case, imperialist war aims. My point is that there are feasible alternatives to both freemarket neo-liberal capitalism and the Stalinist command economy. In view of the discredit brought to the whole idea of communism by the disastrous experience of the Soviet Union, it is imperative that we work out a feasible alternative to capitalism that is not utopian, nor assumes superabundance in the distant future but that as Nove insisted could feasibly be working within the lifetime of a child born today. I suggest this be one of the principal subjects of discussion and research. An Economic Programme May I (with some trepidation as I am no economic expert) sketch out a draft of a programme. 1. Taking the major banks into public ownership and using them to determine the general size and direction of capital investment. With the divorce of money from gold and silver, it is possible for national (and international) banks to create the necessary finance by various means. (This was done by the Bank of England during it is, I think, called quantitative easing.) 2. The creation of planning authorities to determine the overall direction of economic activity to meet the needs of society. For example, it would, through the publicly-owned banks, allocate the finance for extra hospitals, more public transport, pensions, education, etc. 3. The transformation of privately-owned enterprises into self-governing cooperatives. The boards of these enterprises should be elected by the workers and staff
and include representatives of the users of the enterprises product (for example, the domestic users of gas and electricity), plus representatives of the local community in which the enterprises are situated. In other words, social not just workers control. 4. Market relations between the self-governing enterprises within the boundaries set by the planning authorities. Thus contracts for the new hospitals would be tendered for by self-governing building enterprises which would purchase their materials from other self-governing enterprises. The overall boundaries of the whole economy would be set (planned) through the central allocation of capital via the publiclycontrolled banking system an alternative to the Stalinist command economy. 5. Climate warming and ecological threats; aid to poor countries. The same mechanisms as above, but on an international sale, should be used. For example, a new Copenhagen Conference but which would be responsive to the grass-roots demands for implementing the necessary measures, proposed by the best scientific brains. The necessary finance for large-scale projects such as solar power sites in the African deserts, major wind and tidal energy generation projects, etc, funded by the publicly-owned banks, in this case, the transformation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund into democratically-controlled institutions. This is only a very rough sketch of a possible programme which would bring immediate benefits to humankind, even if it went no further, but would also start the transition to a communist society Achieving Power The above measures or similar ones cannot be achieved by self-activity alone on which you place such emphasis. Directing a complex economy and the large-scale ecological measures needed can only be carried out by large governmental bodies, state administrations whatever you like to call them. From history and experience we can draw a general conclusion self-activity alone is not enough. In times of crisis and revolution the popular masses become active agents on the political stage, demonstrate, riot, strike, etc, and are capable of bringing down governments and regimes; but once the new government is in place the masses retreat into inactivity. This happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and also in Russia in 1917. In all these cases, the self-activity of the masses was short-lived. No doubt in some cases the new regimes are more democratic and less repressive, but they are not necessarily the ones the revolting peoples would have chosen. To maintain control over the new regimes requires a level of popular involvement in daily political activity that it is difficult to maintain when the immediate crisis or conflict is over. Then revolutionaries who want a communist society have to start energising the masses all over again. Those who wish to bring about these or other social transformations must achieve political power and keep it. You say very little about how to achieve this except general references to self-activity, self-organisation and selfemancipation. But to install and maintain new governments able to introduce the measures discussed above you need more than that. You need parties/movements with a
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clear programme of how to run society and that are capable of implementing these programmes. And these parties/movements need to achieve power. Here we come up against the perennial question the parliamentary or the revolutionary road? Taking over the state or destroying it? Or a combination of both? And also the question of what sort of party. Which Road To Power? Let me state clearly that the orthodox Marxist-Leninist rejection of the parliamentary road and insistence that violent revolution and the complete destruction of the existing state machine are the only road to socialism is nonsense. Was the struggle of the Chartists in Britain and of those in other countries for universal suffrage, one person one vote and elected parliaments a waste of time? So long as relatively free elections and parliaments are possible we must make use of these gains from past struggles. It is of course true that this democracy is imperfect; that the money and bribery of the rich, a venal press, all distort the popular will; that lobbying and pressure on ministers by the big corporations and the banks sway government policy; and that in the final analysis right-wing military coups as in Chile can overthrow governments. But should we refuse to start on that road in case it is blocked? So long as the possibility exists, and is not yet blocked, we should go as far as we can to capture that part of the state machine. We should then proceed, from this vantage point, to democratise the whole state machine, introduce self-government in enterprises, localities and communities and encourage the self-activity that you advocate. This is what Chvez has been doing in Venezuela. The strategy is not to destroy the old state machine from outside, but to capture parts of it with the support of popular movements and use this power to democratise the rest of society and the economy. So long as the vast majority of the working class and middle class still accept the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy (and they still do in most countries) for socialists to reject this and call for non-existent Soviets to take power is to make themselves ridiculous and to isolate themselves. The way forward is by a combination of parliamentary politics and pressure from below as has been shown in Venezuela and Bolivia. Against Ultimatism Flexibility and a certain amount of pragmatism is required. We should be prepared to work together with others on practical campaigns we can agree on while continuing to disagree on other matters. As far as possible the widest possible participation from the members and supporters of these movements/parties should be aimed at. We should avoid ultimatism. It is possible that in response to pressure from environmental campaigns, and also in order to avoid a total collapse of society and therefore their own position, even right-centre governments may be forced to go some way to dealing with climate change and poverty issues. The pressure and mass campaigning must continue at any new G20 meetings and Copenhagen Conferences. Any, even partial measures which limit environmental damage and thus minimise at least some misery are to be welcomed. They should not be rejected if their rejection means no progress at all. All or nothing is not a good strategy. This does not mean that we should therefore cease to strive for the all.
What Sort of Party? You, understandably, have little faith in the old social democratic parties and the successors of the old communist parties. So what should we do? Build new parties from scratch? Or work within existing parties in an attempt either to transform them or win a portion of their membership to split off and form the new party? I confess I dont know the answer. But it is not a matter of principle and should not divide us too much. I suspect it depends on the situation on the ground in each country and at each stage. It is evident that most of the opposition to global capitalism and its effects, and most of the mobilisations about environmental issues are activated by people coming into politics outside existing parties and are in fact those who are disillusioned with politics. I think it is those you are thinking of when you talk of self-activity. These are the people who organise and attend the Social Forums, who demonstrated at Seattle and in London at the G20 conference and at Copenhagen, who organise the Climate Camps. But these are mainly campaigns against different
aspects of global capitalism, against the symptoms of the disease; they lack a unifying theme. They need to be united to fight for something; for a cure to the disease itself. That is a radical transformation of society. This is where I think your effort should be directed. To popularise the need for a programme, a programme of measures such as I outlined above and the need for the building of movements or parties in each country fighting to achieve power in order to implement this programme. However it is done, the current disparate movements Social Forums, environmental campaigns, social liberation movements must eventually form coalitions or generate parties/movements aiming for political power at local, regional, national and international levels and with programmes containing practical and feasible proposals to deal with the social and environmental problems that we face. To achieve this, dogmatism, sectarianism and factional manoeuvring must be replaced by open and comradely discussion which is the road you are advocating. Good luck.
JJ Plant
Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909)

Revolutionary Educator
HE twelfth of October 2009 was the little-marked centenary of the judicial/religious murder of Francisco 1 Ferrer (full name Francisco Ferrer y Guardia). Ferrer had deserved much better from revolutionaries of all stripes than he got in his day a few belated words from me will make paltry amends, but I hope better than none. His name being tolled, ring out his crimes. Since crime is all the ruling vermin, their judges and their clergy expect from honest working men, ring them long and loud. Let them send to know for whom the bells toll. Ring out wild bells of Rhymney, nine tailors of the apocalypse to wring the brass necks of the bourgeoisie. In his taciturn Introduction to The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School, McCabe lays it down: On 12 October 1909, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia was
shot in the trenches of the Montjuich Fortress at Barcelona. A Military Council had found him guilty of being head of the insurrection which had, a few months before, lit the flame of civil war in the city and province. The clergy had openly petitioned the Spanish Premier, when Ferrer was arrested, to look at the Modern School and its founder for the source of the revolutionary feeling. Were that the long and short of it, Ferrer would in any case have been a martyr to be lauded against lords and their Lords. It was neither, but he is. McCabe proceeds to describe the extensive preparations of the prosecution, the granting of free pardons to Judases, the suppression of defence evidence, the pre-emptive imprisonment of defence witnesses and the contemptible parody of judicial process. Ferrers defenders persisted courageously, and eventually compelled the authorities to acknowledge that there was no evidence against him, and enforced the restitution of his property to his heirs. To finance the publication of The Origin was one of their first acts when their resources were reinstated. So the charges of having organised the uprising of 190506 being a trumpery, what was it that the clergy and the monarchists so loathed in Ferrer that they were prepared to hazard all their pretended values to ensure his death in
2. An ill-omened citadel, later the scene of Francoite atrocities in the Civil War.
1.
Let any unslaked imbiber of the lees of history turn to The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1913) by Ferrer, translated by the tireless, indomitable anti-cleric Joseph McCabe (originally published by Putnams and now available to the spendthrift from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprints), and also to The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States by Paul Avrich (AK Press, 2006). Avrich, to his eternal credit, does not permit overstatement of the defence of Ferrer. He dismisses, with supporting evidence, the claims that Ferrer had no connection with the revolutionary anarchist movement in Spain or France during the period of the Modern School. Nevertheless, he defends Ferrer against the charges on the basis of which he was killed. 28
1909? What, in short, was The Modern School and how did it threaten the established order? And what was Ferrers contribution to it? Paul Avrich assembled biographical material on Ferrer in English, to provide the background to his account of anarchist education projects in the USA, on which the following section is based. Born into a devout Catholic family, Ferrer acquired an enthusiasm for radical ideas quite early, from an uncle who was a Freemason and Republican, and from an early employer who was a militant atheist. He developed violently anti-clerical views and supported the Republican tendency led by Manuel Ruz Zorilla. Working as a railway conductor he was able to courier for Zorilla, who was in exile in Paris. After an unsuccessful Republican uprising in 1885, Ferrer himself had to seek refuge in France, where he remained for 16 years. During his long French exile he became involved in education, teaching at a Masonic school, and also in the Free Thought movement. He evolved politically towards anarchism, coming into contact with exiled Spanish anarchists as well as distinguished French anarchists including Louise Michel and lise Reclus. Ideas of libertarian education were acquiring currency, and one of the first schools to be developed under libertarian theory was opened by Paul Robin in an orphanage. Emma Goldman summarised Robins approach: He believed that whatever part heredity may play, there are other factors equally great, that may and will eradicate or minimise the so-called first cause. Proper economic and social environment, the breath and freedom of nature, healthy exercise, love and sympathy, and, above all, a deep understanding of the needs of the child these would destroy the cruel, unjust and criminal stigma imposed on the ignorant child. Although Robin was removed from his post under pressure from conservative and clerical critics, his school survived and was to be the catalyst for the formation of the League for Libertarian Education, which received support from Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Ferrer was enthusiastic about this development, seeing in it a way to combine his work as an educator with his by-then profound anarchism. He corresponded at length with Robin, while formulating his own plan for a libertarian school in Spain. In 1900 he received a large legacy from a lady to whom he had taught Spanish, and he was able to return to Barcelona to set up his school. In 1901 Spain was a disenchanted society, having lost a war with the USA and with it a ramshackle empire. Education had been neglected by the state, and illiteracy hobbled two-thirds of the people. Only a third of towns had a public school, and even the religious schools were chronically under-resourced. In the publicly-funded schools, teachers were obliged to uphold catholic dogma, and their work was supervised by the clergy, not by a professional inspectorate. Nationalists and Republicans saw reformed education as a means to national regeneration, and there was widespread support across the classes for modernisation of education. Ferrer was to strike while the popular iron was hot. There had been sporadic attempts to establish secular, republican, anarchist and Fourierist schools in Spain from as early as the 1840s, most of which had failed from lack of resources and funding. Ferrers rationalist approach, which
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he called The Modern School, was widely welcomed. While he was no great original in educational theory, he brought together in a practical and effective way all the best thinking of the previous half-century, including in particular the ideas of Robin and Pestalozzi on curriculum and independent learning, and combined them with Bakunins determined rationalism. Ferrers anarchism, however, led him to view state education as almost as bad as religious. Avrich traces Ferrers educational anti-statism to William Godwin, who saw the school as an instrument of domination in the hands of the ruling class. Ferrers libertarian education was opposed as much to the state as to the church, and he called for true educators not to impose their wills and ideas upon children, but to draw out of them their own direction and development. The Modern School Ferrers financial windfall enabled him to establish his Modern School (Escuela Moderna), independent of the state and the church, and to sidestep the difficult problem of how a generalised system of libertarian education could be instituted. (A whole social system could not realistically expect an uninterrupted flow of bequests from grateful tutees.) Ferrer charged for tuition in his school, on a sliding scale related to family income, but undoubtedly he subsidised his project from his legacy, to ensure that his school was well equipped with modern resources. His school was never large, never exceeding 200 pupils. (I have not found anything in Ferrers writings in English that indicates he had a view on the size of schools, which is an important discussion today, when the bankocrats press for efficiency and economies of scale against the educators insistence on the primacy of human interaction.) Not only did he offer equal access for female pupils, he also encouraged social mixing across classes. Avrich has provided some inspirational remarks from Ferrer, describing his approach: I will teach them only the simple truth. I will not ram a dogma into their heads. I will not conceal from them one iota of fact. I will teach them not what to think but how to think. Furthermore, he wrote, the whole value of education consists in respect for the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of the child. Education is not worthy of the name unless it is stripped of all dogmatism, and unless it leaves to the child the direction of its powers and is content to support them in their manifestations. In The Origin... Ferrer restates the Programme of his Barcelona Modern School. Although he reviewed the programme annually, to promote discussion among his supporters, the essential points remained in place through the life of the school. These were: Scientific rationalism as the basis for education, in clear contradistinction to all inherited dogma and habit of thought. Coeducation of the sexes. Coeducation of the social classes. Clean and hygienic school premises. (If this sounds quaint, bear in mind that the discoveries of Pasteur had almost no penetration into the minds of the illiterate
majority, and that the Sunday lectures for parents stressed such basics as hand-washing after use of the toilet, and not wearing long trailing dresses to walk in streets fouled by excrement. And in England the Board Schools were still being built with adequate daylight, heating and toilets for the mass of working-class children for the first time in many areas.) Teachers trained in scientific, rationalist approaches. Neither reward nor punishment for childrens progress or participation, no examinations. Commissioning new, secular textbooks to facilitate rationalist education, and also to support adult education, and the exclusion from the school library of textbooks tainted with religious and other dogma. Adult education, in the form of Sunday lectures, to extend the benefits of rationalist education to the families of the school children (it was this element of the programme that was first to attract serious hostility from the religious). Ferrers lessons were frequently practical, based on providing opportunities for direct experience and first-hand learning. His pupils would learn about industry, for example, by visiting a factory and talking to the people there. The habit of individual direct observation was continuously encouraged, through excursions and visits to museums. In the same building as the Escuela Moderna, Ferrer established a training college for libertarian, rationalist teachers, and a publishing house for the kind of textbooks his curriculum required. Most of these were translations from French. Clearly the Escuela Moderna was a centre of independent thinking preparing itself to propagate its ideas and methods rapidly and widely. It was inevitable that it would receive the hostility of both church and state, ably articulated by the police and press. When in May 1906 an employee in Ferrers publishing house was arrested for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the king, Ferrers opponents seized their opportunity. Ferrer was imprisoned for over a year while the case against him was assembled, but it failed in court and he was released. In the intervening period, however, the Escuela Moderna was forcibly closed. On his release Ferrer toured Europe, rallying support for the growing movement for libertarian education, sparking new projects in several cities, and promoting the formation of new journals. There is no doubt that his persecution by church and state alike perversely supported the spread of his ideas. But this burgeoning movement was to be decapitated. In 1909, back in Barcelona, Ferrer was again arrested. The government had been engaged in a war in Morocco, and by the summer needed to call up reservists. The exasperated population resisted. Martial law was imposed and met with mass rallies and a general strike. Eventually, after the loss of hundreds of lives in the fighting, the government prevailed. Among mass arrests, Ferrer was accused of being a principal author of the insurrection. Avrich concedes that Ferrer was almost certainly involved in the mass resistance with his history and thinking he could hardly fail to be but summarises the defence case convincingly to show that he was far from being the instigator or leader. So we can now answer our own question. What the church and the ruling classes were afraid of was precisely that an educational approach was being developed that
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would liberate the masses from the limits placed upon their thinking and action by ignorance, illiteracy and dogma. Inevitably those liberated masses would reject and overthrow the physical and intellectual constraints of the old regime. The bulk of Avrichs book describes the response across the USA to Ferrers exemplary school. A widespread movement of Modern Schools sprang up and was maintained into the 1960s. The quality of research and writing, as always with Avrich, ensure that the book is interesting on its own terms, and not just for the echoes of Ferrer. The State and Education Do Ferrers ideas have any relevance for us today? State provision of free education has become a widespread expectation since the Second World War in most of Europe, with legally pious exceptions to be made, in a number of countries, for religion-based schools with some degree of state subsidy. It has become fused in Britain into the general popular conception of the welfare state, along with health care, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and so on. So Ferrers charging for education will come as something of a surprise to many socialists who have lived inside the welfare state for so long all their lives that they do not realise that they are what Ferrer would have called state-socialists. But how else can a radical approach to education be brought about if it is not to be financed (and therefore controlled) by the state? In the UK a few years ago the department of state inspection for schools, OFSTED, had its powers extended, in the wake of the Soham child murders, to all paid-for day care of children. One immediate result of this was that large numbers of child-carers operating on a neighbourhood level simply withdrew their services, thereby raising the price for child-care and professionalising the whole sector, leaving the children of large numbers of workingclass families at the mercy of price-grinding businesses. This line of thought found its logical, if absurd, conclusion in the view that family friends and neighbours should undergo police record-checking before being trusted with occasional care of children (from which ministers and bureaucrats only withdrew my guess is temporarily in the face of sustained criticism and mockery). And since a major proportion of violence towards and abuse of children is perpetrated by parents, is it not inevitable, according to the same logic, that parents themselves should have to be licensed by the state to take care of their children? So there arises a difficult cluster of issues. Workingclass parents, especially single parents, under pressure from the state to return to work (as if work were a natural condition like gravity) are forced to abandon the care of their children, not to trusted members of their neighbourhood, but to registered and bureaucratically-approved businesses. The state thereby usurps many human functions otherwise met by families, extended families, neighbourhoods and communities, in the interest of economic efficiency and competitiveness. (The same dehumanising process impacts on the opposite end of the life-span, as the elderly can no longer be included in extended family units where all those physically capable of it are forced into work.) Should the state undertake all these roles? It certainly seems to be the case that children are at greater risk of physical and sexual violence than had previously been un-
derstood when the base-line of social legislation was drawn. Liberals (of all ilks) are at the time of writing attempting to allocate the bulk of blame onto religious institutions, directing their fire with especial glee against the catholics, but it is clear that child abuse is regrettably common in state nurseries, orphanages and other care settings, and that most abuse takes place within the framework of families. That children should be protected from such hazard is only contested by ultra-right libertarians, who envision that the free market can supplant the role of the state in social welfare, that is, that children should be protected from violence if and only if their parents can and will afford such protection; that safety is a good with a price to be set by supply and demand. Part of my own view was formed in a seemingly marginal discussion in a small Trotskyist group three decades ago. A feminist position was put forward that attacked the view that female workers should be protected from the stresses of shift work because of their special obligations towards their children. Night work in the car factories of Cowley, Longbridge and Dagenham would, it seemed to us, result in domestic conditions harmful to working-class children. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks (to whom we looked for precedent) had argued for special protection of women and children from the worst excesses of industrial exploitation, and we proposed to apply this to oppose the extension of night shift working in the car factories to female workers, just as we opposed those feminists who wanted women to be allowed to work in the coal pits and on the oil rigs of the North Sea. The feminists, and some ultra-lefts, regarded this not as a protection but as a reactionary denial to women of access to the economic opportunities seemingly offered by night work. Any difficulties arising to the children of working-class families should, they considered, be dealt with by reallocation of domestic responsibilities within the family (this was referred to in the late 1970s as sexual politics), and by demanding socialised child-care within the factory and (naturally) under trade union control. In the boardrooms the Thatcherite generation of management was in the ascendant, preparing to destroy the coal, steel and car industries, and they were happy to allow women workers full access to the night shift. I continue to hold the view that children and women should be specially protected from the dangers of the workplace, and all that has become clear about the dangers of sexual abuse of children in the last 20 years has done no more than convince me that the same demand has broader and more intense applicability. The fact that state employees can make absurd, preposterous errors in pursuit of that goal (as in the Satanic abuse instance) is beside the point. Is there any realistic prospect of removing any aspect of education from state control? Indeed, is such a change desirable? It certainly does appear to be desirable to the Blairites, who have wished to hand over control of state education and its assets to religious and commercial groups. (At the time of writing, in the early stages of the official General Election campaign, New Labour is proposing legislation which will permit and encourage groups to set up new schools, and the Cameron Tories are parroting the same squawk.) The commercial operation of schools (Academies they are currently called) has not been a success, and in many cases has been a failure. A number of academies have con31
sistently produced exam results that would have led to closure if they had been community schools. It is a scandal that academies are protected by OFSTED when other categories of school are under increasingly aggressive pressure to produce results. And in a number of cases the financial contributions promised by the usurping businesses have simply never been delivered. Further, the academies are protected against the standardised financial reporting that is required of all other schools, so it remains impossible to judge whether the claimed efficiency of applying business methods to schools has resulted in any improvement of any kind (so the market solution is protected from the main condition for the operation of a market the availability of information about cost). Despite occasional puffs and promises from New Labour, the religious schools are able to operate in a de facto selective manner, which in itself adequately explains the superior results that some of them achieve. In addition they find sinister spiritual pressure methods of extorting regular and substantial donations and voluntary work from the parents to finance school resources and activities. There would be a major strategic risk in the working class supporting any weakening of the demand for state education. Commercial and religious interests (and the distinction is probably bogus anyway) are already poised to transform schools into revenue streams indeed the number of schools locked into vampiric contracts under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), Building Schools for the Future (BSF) and most recently the Primary Capital Programme (PCP) is growing steadily. And the potential instability of the management companies that seize the power to operate as school landlords under these contracts could eventually mean that pupils and teachers are locked out while creditors battle over ownership of the assets. So is it worth the risk, to demand the right of workingclass communities and organisations to develop their own approaches to education, based on rationalism, secularism and socialism? Are not our enemies in a much better position to exploit any resulting opportunities? Almost certainly that is the case at present. The privatisers and the religious would swoop on any further concessions like the proverbial diptera on faeces, while organised labour and working-class communities would hesitate to organise themselves. (The NUTs propensity for boycotts would almost certainly render them useless in any real practical development.) And there continues to be widespread public support for the principle of education provision through democratically accountable local authorities. In the London Borough of Ealing recently, a typically bureaucratic exercise in public consultation over the operation of a new high school showed that a decisive majority thought that the Local Authority should build and operate the school in the normal way. Encouragingly, there was a strongly expressed opinion that religious groups in particular should not be allowed to take control of the new school. Naturally, the Torycontrolled Local Authority has proceeded in the opposite direction to that indicated by public preferences. Nevertheless, with the major political parties all advocating one or another form of school privatisation, it is likely that working-class communities will have to face decisions about how to defend the future of their schools, and
some element of engagement may be inevitable. Middleclass parents, religious influences and outright privatisers will be prepared to push their agendas ruthlessly, and their fingers will be fast-tracked into the till by whoever is the
government. If we are forced into contending against such people for control of our community schools, then Ferrers model is one of the best around.
Hitched On His Own Petard

Writing about George Orwells Animal Farm in the Guardian on 17 April 2010, Christopher Hitchens proclaimed in the modest fashion we have come to expect from him: There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took years to notice what was staring me in the face). Nobody noticed at the time? Someone did. Writing in The Nation on 7 September 1946, the US left-winger Isaac Rosenfeld reviewed Orwells tale, explaining that Snowball was Trotsky, with a soupon of Lenin for simplicitys sake, Vladimir Ilyich is left out of the picture, entering it only as a dybbuk who shares with Marx old Majors identity, and with Trotsky, Snowballs. This review is reproduced in Jeffrey Meyers collection George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London, 1975). And did nobody else notice this fact until our observant Mr Hitchens made his discovery? Well, not exactly. Twenty or so years later, BT Oxley wrote in his brief George Orwell (London, 1967) that there is no figure corresponding to Lenin (Major dies before the rising takes place); and another decade down the line Alex Zwerdling, in his major study Orwell and the Left (New Haven, 1978), wrote about the discrepancies between the course of the Russian Revolution and the events in Orwells fable, and informed us: The most striking of these is the omission of Lenin from the drama. Major is clearly meant to represent Marx, while Napoleon and Snowball act out the conflict in the post-revolutionary state between Stalin and Trotsky. David Wykes A Preface to Orwell (Harlow, 1987) also clearly indicated the absence of a Lenin parallel in Animal Farm. A decade ago, this magazine published a pamphlet by the present author, I Know How But I Dont Know Why: George Orwells Conception of Totalitarianism (Coventry, 1999, reprinted 2000); and a revised version of it was published in the collection George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist (London, 2005). Once again, Lenins absence was duly noted: Some of the characters are eponymous. The taciturn, devious and ambitious Napoleon is clearly Stalin, and the more inventive and vivacious Snowball is an equally obvious Trotsky There is, however, no porcine Lenin, as Major (Marx) dies just before the animals take over the farm, although the displaying of Majors skull is reminiscent of the rituals around the embalmed Bolshevik leader. Many other authorities have attempted to find Lenin somewhere in the piggery. Jenni Calders Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Milton Keynes, 1987) claimed that Major is a composite of Marx and Lenin; a view that also appeared in Averil Gardners George Orwell (Boston, 1987), Jeffrey Meyers A Readers Guide to George Orwell (London, 1984), Brodies Notes (London, 1976), and York Notes (Harlow, 1980). On the other hand, Robert Lees Orwells Fiction (London, 1969) and Ruth Ann Liefs Homage to Oceania (Ohio, 1969) both reckoned that Major was Lenin. Finally, in International Socialism, no 44 (Autumn 1989), John Molyneux took a quite different viewpoint: It is clear that Napoleon represents Stalin, just as Old Major is Marx and Snowball is Trotsky. Who then represents Lenin? Since Orwell depicts the Rebellion as led by two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, one is forced to the conclusion that Napoleon also represents Lenin. Thus in Animal Farm the figures of Lenin and Stalin are merged into one character. So the absence in Animal Farm of a pig representing Lenin, or of a character that at least partly represented him, has been discussed by a wide variety of writers over no less a time than six decades. Hitchens unique discovery is thus nothing but a hollow boast, one based equally upon arrogance and ignorance. I will not say that nobody has praised Christopher Hitchens for his modesty. But I doubt if many people have. Paul Flewers
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Tawneys Wit and Wisdom

L
IKE Confucius, the historian and political thinker Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962) had some good sayings. By way of illustration here is a selection from the pages of The Attack and Other Papers (Spokesman, 1961; originally Allen and Unwin, 1953).
governments with it. No authority exists to steady the ship before it is too late. Where the monster will next break loose, when peace returns [this was written in 1944] no one can say; but, unless he finds his master, break loose he will. The people to pay the price will be unhappy men and women trembling for their jobs. (p 90)
Only those institutions are loved which touch the imagination. (p 34)
To expel a person is not to exorcise a spirit. (p 55) [Shades of the fall of a certain Damian McBride, April 2009.]
In 1918, the Labour Party finally declared itself to be a Socialist Party. It supposed, and supposes [1934] that it became one. It is mistaken. It recorded a wish, that is all; the wish has not been fulfilled. (p 58)
The war should have taught us that it is idle to blazon Liberty, Equality and Fraternity on the faades of public buildings, if to display the same motto in factories and mines would arouse only the cynical laughter that greets a reminder of idealisms turned sour and hopes unfulfilled. What men desire is, not paragraphs in constitutions, but results, in the form of arrangements which ensure them the essentials of a civilised existence and show a proper respect for their dignity as human beings. (p 91)
Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger paw by paw; vivisection is its trade, and it does the skinning first. If the Labour Party is to tackle its job with some hope of success, it must mobilise behind it a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it. (p 63)
What matters is not that the party should advance a glittering programme, with promises for everyone, but that it should put the nation on its mettle. It is that it should concentrate on a limited number of essentials, should tell the public frankly why it holds them to be indispensable, and should prove the sincerity of its convictions by showing that, rather than abandon them, it is willing to be driven from office. (p 100)
Either the Labour Party means to end the tyranny of money, or it does not [1934]. If it does, it must not fawn on the owners and symbols of money. (p 67)
It is obvious that, as the world is today, no nation can save itself by itself; we must cooperate, or decline. (p 69) [More like collapse into barbarism, as of 2010.]
[Quoting Sydney and Beatrice Webb in their Industrial Democracy.] Without the common rule that the law lays down and without the services that the municipality supplies, the citizen of the twentieth century would usually find it impossible to live. (p 113)
Before values can become a power in everyday life, they need interests as their allies. If they prevail and win general acceptance, they do so with the limitations which those allies impose. They do not, on that account, cease to be values. The idea that they do the description of honesty and good faith as bourgeois morality, as though virtues ceased to be virtues when practised (if they are practised) by the middle classes, or the dismissal of political democracy with a shrug of the shoulders as capitalist democracy, as though in a capitalist society it could be anything else these and similar inanities had their run in the silly season of the 1930s, when Bloomsbury awoke to the recondite fact of the existence of the class struggle and announced its discovery with blood-curdling beats, and invitations to hunt tigers were circulated by sportsmen with whom a brave man might well have hesitated to shoot rabbits. (pp 84-85)
Social processes, in order to be controlled, must first be understood. (p 143) [This certainly applies to the behaviour of the world economy 1998-2010.]
Like religion, the family is an aspect of life whose deceitful quiescence in tranquil times cajoles successive generations of bright intellects into paeans or dirges on its supposed demise, but which revives, when hit, like a watered flower. (p 150) [From a review of a book by Richard Titmuss entitled Problems of Social Policy, which deals at length with life for civilians in the UK in the Second World War.]
Courage is admirable, not because it is rare, but because it is common. It reveals, being common, the true nature of man. (p 151)
[On the world economy in the 1930s: compare 2007-10.] A collapse of prices sends industry over a precipice and some
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To share risks is easy; but it is not enough. It is necessary also to be eager to share advantages; and the conviction that advantages which are shared are not advantages at all is, in England, deeply ingrained. (p 156)
All creeds suffer at the hands of history a double deformation. They undergo a process of dilution and petrification dilution by the world, petrification by the elect It is a wise prophet who knows his own gospel by the time that his disciples have shown their devotion by defending it. (p 158) [From a review of a work by various authors entitled Christianity and the Social Revolution, published by Victor Gollancz in 1935, in the New Statesman. We can all think of examples, but not the least is that of Adam Smith, advocate in the eighteenth century CE of laissez faire and the invisible hand of the market now increasingly the visible fist thereof.]
On the whole, whatever may have been true of its past, capitalism today, except in so far as qualified by influences derived from other sources and long resisted by it, is not so much un-Christian as anti-Christian, and not least antiChristian when it summons Christianity to its defence. (p 170)
In the interminable case of Dubb v Superior Persons and Co [Dubb is the civilian equivalent of the soldier Tommy Atkins], whether Christians, Capitalists or Communists, I am an unrepentant Dubbite. So I am in the unfortunate position of being unable to applaud my friends for their vices, which since their shining virtues will look after themselves is what friends usually desire. (p 164)
In Western Europe and the United States mans struggle with nature has been turned from a series of skirmishes into a mass attack, and the economic system from a feeble instrument, perpetually breaking in his hands, into an engine of extraordinary, and increasing, power. (p 174) [Tawney would probably agree that this, industrial capitalism, is the cause of our environmental problems world-wide.]
The two great apostasies, the ideology of riches and the ideology of power, have had a long reign. (p 191)
Chris Gray
Second Glance
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
HIS is a book1 which no intelligent observer of our contemporary world can afford to ignore. Robert Paxton gives a pretty thorough description of the historical course of fascism in the twentieth century CE, and his analysis is useful in helping to identify later movements that resemble the classical ones but have significant differences. Awareness of such differences is obviously important in combating such movements. Particularly useful is Paxtons identification of a fivestage cycle in the life of fascism, viz:
their anger and disillusion without heed for oldfashioned law or morality. Politically, it generated economic and social strains that exceeded the capacity of existing institutions whether liberal or conservative to resolve. (p 28) Connected with this concatenation of effects was the fact that: European peoples had endured their first prolonged experience of universal national service, rationing of food, energy and clothing, and full-scale economic management. Despite these unprecedented efforts, however, none of the belligerents had achieved its goals. Instead of a short war with clear results, this long and labour-intensive carnage had ended in mutual exhaustion and disillusion. (p 29) As a result: Those who had survived the trenches could not forgive those who had sent them there. (p 30) This shows how the degree of alienation and disillusionment could move people just as much towards the political right as towards the left. Nonetheless, Paxton recognises the importance of the lefts potential triumph in such circumstances: Fascism is inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist left. (p 43) What he means is: fascism is inconceivable without a real threat from the left. One could argue, of course, that the socialist threat in Italy in 1920-22 was more apparent
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(1) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalisation or entropy. (p 23) The author also includes an extensive annotated bibliography which helps us to investigate matters further. Paxton is particularly sharp when dealing with the historical effects of the First World War: Culturally, the war discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future, and cast doubt upon liberal assumptions about natural human harmony. Socially, it spawned armies of restless veterans (and their younger brothers) looking for ways to express
1. Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2004), pp 321, 9.99.
than real because the Italian Socialist Party made no attempt to organise a revolution. Even so, it repeatedly called for one, and the bourgeoisie is not particularly enamoured of the social democracy precisely because it senses the potential of this force to become radicalised in a genuine revolutionary party. What Paxton does not sufficiently stress, however, is that the fascist success is built upon the lefts failures the history of Italian and German socialism and communism in the 1920s and 1930s shows this clearly, even if it would perhaps be tedious to go into the detailed circumstances here. I do not propose, either, to go into the minutiae of Paxtons description of his various stages in the rise and decline of fascism from 1922 to 1945, which are, as I think, admirably presented. Instead it seems worthwhile focussing on the wider ramifications of the analysis. For example, Paxton is not willing to consider Francos Spain or Salazars Portugal as examples of classical fascism. Of the former he writes: Francos regime did have a single party the Falange but without parallel structures [party institutions existing parallel to the various branches of the state] it lacked autonomous power. Although it grew to nearly a million members during the period of German victories in 1941-42, and gave the dictatorship useful support with its ceremonies, the Caudillo allowed it no share in policy-making or administration After 1945 the Falange became a colourless civic solidarity association, normally referred to simply as the Movimiento. In 1970 its very name was abolished. By then Franquist Spain had long become an authoritarian regime dominated by the army, state officials, businessmen, landowners and the Church, with almost no visible fascist coloration. (pp 149-50) The Portuguese case, in Paxtons eyes, is even clearer: The Estado Novo of Portugal differed from fascism even more profoundly than Francos Spain. Salazar was, in effect, the dictator of Portugal, but he preferred a passive public and a limited state where social power remained in the hands of the Church, the army and the big landowners. In July 1934 Dr Salazar actually suppressed an indigenous Portuguese fascist movement, National Syndicalism, accusing it of exaltation of youth, the cult of force through socalled direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, the propensity for organising the masses behind a political leader not a bad description of fascism. (pp 217-18) Argentina is another example, Paxton argues, of the misapplication of the fascist label, in that, whereas Hitler and Mussolini destroyed the independent workers movement and diminished the working-class share of national income, Pern relied on the (admittedly manipulated) Argentinean CGT and actually increased the workers share of national income from 40 per cent in 1946 to 49 per cent in 1949 (p 195). The Pern regime lacked a demonised internal or external enemy, showed no interest in military adventures and included a charismatic female figure in the shape of Perns wife Eva (Evita).
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It is unfortunate that Paxton does not pursue further this question of regimes which have been called fascist but whose status is controversial: for example, there is no discussion of Poland under Pisudski: the country figures merely as a victim of Hitlerite aggression and lebensraum appetites. It would appear that there exists an analytical box labelled semi-fascist which no one has yet succeeded in filling adequately. Paxtons remissness in this area is no doubt related to the fact that he is avowedly anti-Marxist: he refers on page 209 to Marxisms determinism, narrowness and shaky empirical foundations no reason given. There is no point in Marxists complaining. What they need to do instead is to advance the analysis developed by some of their own representatives I have in mind in particular August Thalheimer and Leon Trotsky. Thalheimers discussion can be found in English translation in The Strategy and Tactics of the Communist International, a critique of the 1928 Draft Programme of the Comintern (see Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 4, 2004, pp 146-99). Having noted the victory of fascism in Italy, followed by corresponding developments in Bulgaria and Poland these examples are not analysed in depth, Poland being dealt with only briefly, and Bulgaria not at all Thalheimer begins his analysis from the phenomenon of Bonapartism, that is to say, the regime of Louis Napoleon in France (1850-71). Thalheimer is careful to state that, in his own words: It should be taken for granted that I do not put an equals sign between fascism and Bonapartism. But they are related phenomena, with both common and diverging features, which each require investigation. (p 159) Thalheimer begins with a survey of Marxs comments on the situation following the working-class uprising in France in 1848, where he notes that the bourgeoisie abandoned its political existence to save its social existence. In addition to the bourgeoisie, Louis Napoleons regime benefited from the support of the peasants, who wished to preserve private property. A precondition for the rise of Bonaparte was the defeat of the revolutionary working class (p 160). Furthermore, Louis Bonaparte gathered up in his party organisation the declassed elements of all classes (p 161). Here indeed there is a parallel with classic fascism. Thalheimer goes on to stress Marxs comments on the Napoleonic Second Empire in The Civil War in France, where he says: In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the ability of ruling the nation. (Quoted on p 164) Thalheimer concludes that: Bonapartism is one form of bourgeois state power in a situation of defence, retrenchment and refortification, in the face of the proletarian revolution. It is one form of the open dictatorship of capital. Another form, but a closely related one, is the fascist state form. The common denominator is the open (but indirect) dictatorship of capital. Their manifestation is the independence of the executive power. But their social and class content is the complete rule of
the bourgeoisie and private property owners generally over the working class and all other layers exploited by capitalism. (p 165) Thalheimer then goes on to draw various parallels between France under Louis Napoleon and Italy under Mussolini, before outlining various differences (pp 168-72). To his credit, Paxton does give some space to Louis Napoleon. What he has to say is of some interest: Confronted with a liberal (in the nineteenth-century meaning of the term) legislature that tried in 1850 to disenfranchise poor and itinerant citizens, President Louis Napoleon boldly championed manhood suffrage. Even after he had made himself Emperor Napoleon III in a military coup dtat in December 1851, he let all citizens vote for a phantom parliament. Against the liberals preference for a restricted, educate electorate, the emperor pioneered the skilful use of simple slogans and symbols to appeal to the poor and little educated. (p 42) Paxton is to some extent aware of dissident trends within Marxism. He cites with a degree of approval such writers as Gramsci, Ernst Bloch and Nikos Poulantzas, together with Togliattis Lectures on Fascism (International Publishers, 1976). He even refers to Trotsky at one point, citing a passage from Deutschers biography. However, he never refers directly to Trotskys writings on Germany, which contain, as Ernest Mandel showed in his introduction to the Pathfinder volume The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1971), a theory of fascism comparable to his own. But there is a world of difference between Paxtons acute but academic discussion of fascism and Trotskys action-oriented analysis: Trotsky, for example, was anxious to advance, in opposition to the state system produced by the Treaty of Versailles not some independent national version of socialism but the notion of the Soviet United States of Europe (The Turn in the Communist International (September 1930), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p 71). That is also why Trotskys writings on the subject contain some of his most inspiring and prophetic passages, for example, those in Germany, the Key to the International Situation (November 1931) and its sequel, For a Workers United Front Against Fascism (December 1931). Clearly Trotsky grasped the essence of fascism pretty well, as witness the following passage: After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands, directly and immediately, all the organs and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions and the cooperatives. When a state turns fascist, it doesnt only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the pattern set by Mussolini the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers organisations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallisation of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.
The above is not at all contradicted by the fact that during a given period, between the democratic and the fascist systems, a transitional regime is established, which combines the features of both: such, in general, is the law that governs the displacement of one social system by another, even though they are irreconcilably inimical to each other. (What Next? (January 1932), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, pp 155-56) Trotsky also made use of the concept of Bonapartism, characterising the government of Brning in Germany in 1932 as a caricature of the same, that is, as a regime of militarypolice dictatorship, but not as fascism (p 276). Finally, Trotsky voiced a reservation concerning the designation of Pisudskis Polish regime as fascist: Pisudski came to power at the end of an insurrection based upon a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie and aimed directly at the domination of the traditional bourgeois parties in the name of the strong state; this is a fascist trait characteristic of the movement and of the regime. But the specific political weight, that is, the mass of Polish fascism was much weaker than that of Italian fascism in its time and still more than that of German fascism; to a much greater degree, Pisudski had to make use of the methods of military conspiracy and to put the question of the workers organisations in a much more circumspect manner. It suffices to recall that Pisudskis coup dtat took place with the sympathy and the support of the Polish party of the Stalinists. The growing hostility of the Ukrainian and Jewish petty bourgeoisie towards the Pisudski regime made it, in turn, more difficult for him to launch a general attack upon the working class. (Bonapartism and Fascism (July 1934), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p 442) Another work in the Marxist tradition which Paxton might have mentioned but doesnt is Daniel Gurins Fascism and Big Business (Pathfinder, 1973, originally published 1939). Paxton makes the salient point that the captains of industry were reluctant to embrace fascism their preference was for traditional conservatism but, even so, they went along with it, since they needed a battering ram against independent working-class organisation. There is, as a result, no real clash with sophisticated Marxism on this point, although clearly Marxists are keen to emphasise the class relationships involved, in contrast to Paxton, who wishes to play them down. This can be seen in Paxtons eventual definition of fascism (p 218), which is adequate in many ways, but makes no mention of social classes. In this latter context it might be said that Paxton has the virtues of his analytical vices. Hence he is critical of Seymour Lipsets well-known characterisation of fascism as extremism of the centre (Chapter Five, Political Man, Doubleday, 1963). Paxton writes that Lipsets formulation is: based on the rage of once-independent shopkeepers, artisans, peasants and other members of the old middle classes now squeezed between better organised industrial workers and big businessmen,
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and losing out in rapid social and economic change. Recent empirical research, however, casts doubt on the localisation of fascist recruitment in any one social stratum. It shows the multiplicity of fascisms social supports and its relative success in creating a composite movement that cut across all classes. His eyes glued on the early stages, Lipset also overlooked the establishments role in the fascist acquisition and exercise of power. (p 210) Paxton has a brief section on comparisons between Stalinism and fascism as systems of terror. As he notes, discussion of this topic tends to revolve around the question: who was worse? Paxton finds that, while Stalin may have actually killed more individuals if we are to believe Stphane Courtois (see p 304, note 43), Hitler was the more obnoxious inasmuch as Stalins murders were of class enemies (a category open to change) Hitler aimed at the extermination of whole peoples, including women and children, together with the elimination of all cultural trace of them. The question remains of considerable interest: readers wishing to investigate further are advised to start with Hillel Ticktins Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (ME Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 2002), which includes comments on the role of the secret police, the bureaucracy, the party and control over the economy in the respective regimes. Finally Paxton has some interesting observations on fascisms current prospects and its relations with organised religion (the two topics are connected). Having noted the resurgence of the far right in Western Europe and in the Balkans in the 1990s (p 173), he concludes that: If we understand the revival of an updated fascism as the appearance of some functional equivalent and not as an exact repetition, recurrence is possible. (p 175) Paxton notes that conditions in Europe after 1945 were different from those of 1919, in that parliamentary democracy was established and functioned comparatively successfully from then on, there was no threat of Bolshevik revolution and no rationale for the abandonment of free institutions (pp 187-88). However, Paxtons book was written before the credit crunch and the current recession, which would appear to have altered the picture somewhat. There is also the question of a possible alliance between fascism and religion. Paxton correctly points to the original anticlerical stance of Hitler and Mussolini arising from their espousal of revolutionary syndicalism and anti-Habsburg pan-Germanism respectively, but notes that: Even in Europe, religion-based fascisms were not
unknown: the Falange Espaola, Belgian Rexism, the Finnish Lapua Movement and the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael are all good examples, even if we exclude the Catholic authoritarian regimes of 1930s Spain, Austria and Portugal. (p 203) Here again one wishes that Paxton had spread his analytical net a bit wider: his book does not discuss Ulster Protestantism in any shape or form, but at a certain level there are points of contact between loyalism and fascism. Readers wishing to follow this up may like to consult Geoffrey Bell, The Protestants of Ulster (Pluto Press, 1976). In my opinion, Paxton is on to something here. As he says: An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, anti-black and, since 11 September 2001, anti-Islamic as well. (p 174) Furthermore: If religious fascisms are possible, one must address the potential supreme irony for fascism in Israel. Israeli reactions to the first and second intifada have been mixed. Israeli national identity has been powerfully associated with an affirmation of the human rights that were long denied to Jews in the Diaspora. This democratic tradition forms a barrier against giving up free institutions in the fight against Palestinian nationalism. It has been weakened, however, by two trends the inevitable hardening of attitudes in the face of Palestinian intransigence, and a shift of weight within the Israeli population away from European Jews, the principal bearers of the democratic tradition, in favour of Jews from North Africa and elsewhere in the Near East who are indifferent to it. The suicide bombings of the second intifada after 2001 radicalised even many Israeli democrats to the right. By 2002 it was possible to hear language within the right wing of the Likud Party and some of the small religious parties that comes close to a functional equivalent to fascism. The chosen people begins to sound like a Master Race that claims a unique mission in the world, demands its vital space, demonises an enemy that obstructs the realisation of the peoples destiny, and accepts the necessity of force to obtain these ends. (p 204) It would not be fair to Paxton to claim that he is predicting the successful emergence of fascism in either Israel or the USA, but he is, I think, to be commended for raising the possibility of such developments.
Paul Flewers
The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalins Soviet Union, 1929-1941

An exciting 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
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Graham Milner
Rudyard Kipling and British Imperialism

I
FIRST encountered Rudyard Kiplings writings in 1975, as a first-year university student. That year I researched and wrote an essay comparing attitudes to Empire in some of Kiplings Indian short stories with those in EM Forsters A Passage to India. As a socialist, I had an animus against Kiplings pro-imperialist stance, and found Forsters liberal, anti-imperialist views far more congenial. When, in the mid-1980s, I returned to the subject of Kipling, I had the opportunity to spend a lot more time on that occasion looking into the writers literary contribution and at his world-view. Even although I emerged from researching and writing the fairly lengthy essay (which appears below) with a healthier regard for Kiplings abilities as a writer and artist, I still reached essentially similar conclusions to my earlier essay about Kiplings right-wing politics. About 10 years ago, I went up the Western Australian coast to Geraldton for a few days holiday with my partner Monique, and while there I closely re-read Charles Carringtons biography of Kipling. It might have been James (Jan) Morris, in the book Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire, who claimed that the British Empire at its apogee had two geniuses to articulate its spirit Elgar and Kipling. Certainly readers internationally still evidently find Kiplings works to their taste I believe that the books remain in print and sell well. I remember reading somewhere many years ago of an exchange between two literary journalists, one a Westerner and the other from the USSR. The subject of Kipling came up, and the Westerner was surprised to learn that Kipling was a favourite author with Soviet readers. How can that be, he asked, when Kipling was such an unabashed spokesperson for imperialism? Ah! But dont you see, replied the Soviet journalist, laughing, Kipling has a depth of understanding of human nature that transcends these political limitations. I freely admit that in the essay below I might have missed or understated some of the more profound and intricate aspects of Kiplings literary contribution. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a forthright re-statement of the negative case concerning Kipling has some value. I do accept, however, that some of Kiplings prose writings the Jungle Books for example, and some of his poems Recessional stands out are among the finest works in English literature. George Orwell and TS Eliot between them, in the period following Kiplings death, did well to attempt to resuscitate his literary reputation from the position of nadir it had reached at his death in 1936. After Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, his remains were interred in Westminster Abbeys Poets Corner in London,
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the capital city of the world empire that his work had done 1 so much to extol. No literary figures had appeared among 2 his pallbearers, mute testimony to the low ebb his standing had reached in that sphere. Yet from an historical point of view, Kiplings literary reputation diminishes in importance alongside his stature, firstly as a public figure in a larger sense, and secondly as a significant exponent of a politically-based world-view that deserves scrutiny. The above comments are not intended to imply that the literary and artistic dimension of Kiplings life and work should be ignored or understressed, but they emphasise that Kiplings importance is more than literary. As the compilers of the British Dictionary of National Biography point out, Kipling, even by 1899, when he faced death from fever while in the United States, was a national figure, and 3 his death would have been felt as a national calamity. At that time, in the closing years of Queen Victorias reign, Kipling has been seen as having enjoyed a position given before only to Dickens and Tennyson among English writ4 ers. He has been described as being, during his career, for 5 30 years the real [poet] laureate in England, although in 6 fact he always declined the position formally. While inevitably drawing to a large extent upon the body of material produced on its subject by literary critics, this essay seeks primarily to analyse and examine Kipling more as a propagandist of certain values and ideologies of historical significance. It is clearly far beyond the scope of a short paper on a limited subject to deal with the problems associated with a discussion of the nature of art and its relationship with ideology and with the possibilities of 7 any scientific approach to the study of the latter. Imagina1. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London, 1955), p 506. 2. Ibid. 3. British Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement 1931-40 (Oxford, 1949), p 514. 4. FE Smith, Second Earl of Birkenhead (Lord Birkenhead), Rudyard Kipling (London, 1980), p 216. 5. Peter Porter, Rudyard Kipling: A Reassessment, The Listener, 8 April 1965, p 515. 6. In 1895 for example, see Dictionary of National Biography, op cit, p 514. 7. For two views on the relationship between literature and the social sciences, see Richard Hoggart, Literature and Society, in Norman MacKenzie (ed), A Guide to the Social Sciences (London, 1966), pp 225-48, and Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature (London, 1971). The chasm between the sciences and the arts in Western culture in general is dealt with by CP Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge, 1965). For a presentation of the issues facing
tive literature relies upon a sense of expression and appreciation which is often beyond reduction to the merely ideological. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that art can be and has been used deliberately for political or more generally ideological purposes, and thus plays a role in the class struggle. This essay argues that Rudyard Kiplings art was subordinated in its creative impulses to the ideological demands of the authoritarian right and the interests of British imperialism. A Background of Imperialism Before reviewing Kiplings career and output in detail, it may be useful briefly to examine the matrix of his emergence to prominence in the 1890s. The key word when discussing the politics and atmosphere of the late Victorian era, and the 1890s in particular, is imperialism. Some have expressed a desire that this word be expunged from the 8 historians lexicon. Others have gone to considerable lengths to annul any notion that an upsurge in imperialist activity took place in the late nineteenth century, taking exception especially to the understanding of imperialism developed by the left-Liberal John Hobson and the Marxist 9 VI Lenin. There is no consensus on this question in histor10 ical scholarship. Nevertheless, whatever the economic dimension of imperialist development in the late nineteenth century might have been, and whether the monopolisation of industry and the preponderance of finance capital were indeed the taproot of imperialism, as Hobson maintained, it is clear that, culturally and ideologically, Empire in Great Britain, and a colonial drive among other major powers, became important features of this period. As DK Fieldhouse, no friend of the economic interpretation of imperialism, points out of the situation at the turn of the twentieth century, this belief that colonies were an essential attribute of any great nation is one of the most astonishing facts of the period. It was, moreover, an international creed, with beliefs that 11 seemed to differ very little from one country to another. The facts of British colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century speak for themselves. In 1881, the North Borneo Company was chartered. In 1882, Egypt was occupied. In 1885, the Niger Coast Protectorate was formed, and Bechuanaland was annexed. In 1886, Burma was annexed. In 1888, an Imperial British East Africa Company was chartered to occupy Uganda. In 1889, the South Africa Company was chartered, marking the beginning of Rhodesia. In 1891,
Marxist contributors to the theory of literary criticism and aesthetics in general, see Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London, 1976). GSR Kitson Clark, An Expanding Society: Britain 1830-1900 (Melbourne, 1967), Chapter 5. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, The Imperialism of Free Trade, in GH Nadel and P Curtis (eds), Imperialism and Colonialism (London, 1964), pp 97-111. See also the same authors, Africa and the Victorians (London, 1961). For a riposte to some of their arguments see Oliver MacDonagh, The AntiImperialism of Free Trade, Economic History Review, Second Series, Volume 14, pp 489-501. George Lichtheim, Imperialism (Harmondsworth, 1974), does, however, cover many of the central problems in interpretation. DK Fieldhouse, The New Imperialism: The HobsonLenin Thesis Revised, in Nadel and Curtis (eds), Imperialism and Colonialism, p 94. 39
a protectorate over Nyasaland was declared. During 189612 99 the Sudan was reconquered. All this of course took place against a background of colonialist expansion by rival powers. Both major political parties in Britain changed in their attitude to the Empire in this period. The Tory leader Disraeli, who had declared in 1852 that the colonies were millstones around our neck, had by the 1870s adopted a strong 13 imperialist stance. Several prominent members of the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, including Chamberlain and Dilke, became outspoken advocates of stronger imperi14 al ties. Such books as Seeleys The Expansion of England and Dilkes Greater Britain helped to articulate the new attitude to the Empire in the late nineteenth century, but it was a new popular literature that was to circulate the ideas more widely. The rise of a new popular press and mass reading 15 public brought new layers of people into contact with the 16 means for participating in the imperialist spectacle. The artists and literary men of Empire had a special role to play, because imperialism was a faith and emotion before it be17 came a political programme. Those among Kiplings generation of writers who shared the imperialist ideal began to articulate the sentiments generated by the deep shifts in 18 the social structure. The connection with the Indian subcontinent, which had developed and deepened over several centuries, gave the late nineteenth century British Empire a truly magisterial presence in the world arena. The crowning of Victoria as Empress of India in 1876 was a significant moment in the unfolding of a broad imperial vista. Many saw a parallel 19 with ancient Rome.
12. For the foregoing list, see Richard Faber, The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims (London, 1966), p 56. 13. Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (London, 1972), pp 125-29. 14. Richard Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915 (London, 1976), p 144. 15. On these points, see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1965), Part Two, Chapters 2 and 3. 16. The social composition of the new reading public, and that of those who made up Kiplings basic audience, was most often lower-middle-class. George Orwell makes the point that Kiplings popularity was of course, essentially middle class (On Kiplings Death, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 1 (Harmondsworth, 1970), p 183). David Thomson emphasises the suburban, lowermiddle-class appeal of Kipling in the brief discussion in his England in the Nineteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1950), p 205. 17. AP Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies (London, 1959), px. See also DC Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1929), who holds that imperialism was a sentiment rather than a policy, p 186. 18. Shannon makes the observation that Kiplings political commitment distinguished him as the one considerable literary figure within the broad category of modern consciousness who used a deliberate attempt to bridge the gap that had opened between high culture and the mass of society as a central motive of his art (The Crisis of Imperialism, pp 286-87). 19. For a discussion of this theme see Raymond F Betts, The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Victorian Studies, December 1971, pp 149-59. See also Faber, The Vision and the Need, p 120. On British India in general, see Steven Watson, The British in
8. 9.
10. 11.
Kipling, the Man and His Times It was in Bombay, on the west coast of India, that Rudyard Kipling was born into a middle-class Anglo-Indian family in 1865. He spent his first six years in India, learning to speak 20 the vernacular languages as fluently as English. At the age of six, he was taken with his sister to England to board with another family. This proved an unpleasant experience, as he records in a posthumously published autobiographical 21 fragment. He had some contact with literary and artistic relatives in England, including Burne-Jones the painter, and 22 William Morris the socialist poet and designer. From 1878 to 1882, Kipling boarded at Westward Ho!, a public school established by impecunious army and navy 23 officers for the education of their sons. This school provided the background for the stories in Stalky & Co, written 24 by Kipling in the late 1890s. Although Westward Ho! was not necessarily typical of them, English public schools played an important role in training the cadres of Empire, and instilling in their pupils the appropriate ideals of service and duty. As AP Thornton states, the public school spirit became one of the most potent of the imperial elix25 irs. It is doubtless the case that Kipling was imbued while at school with many of the values he took back to India with him as a journalist. Stalky & Co itself became the 26 model for generations of boys school stories in England. In 1882, Kipling left England for India to work on the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Later he also worked on the Allahabad Pioneer. These years (1882-89) were decisive for the development of those writing skills which he was to 27 use with such success. His earliest writings and poems soon began to appear in the columns of the Indian press, and his name became well known in the relatively closed world of Anglo-India. He was extremely precocious, writing and composing on many aspects of Anglo-Indian and native life. Later his stories and poems were collected and published under the titles Plain Tales from the Hills and De28 partmental Ditties. What kind of picture emerges from these early writings, and from Kiplings later writings on India? One Indian critIndia, in Milton Israel (ed), Pax Britannica (London, 1968), pp 71-89, and on the High Noon period, see Michael Edwardes, The Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon, in John Hargreaves (ed), The Expansion of Europe (London, 1968), pp 13153. For a useful overview of relations between the Asian peoples and the West historically, see KM Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (London, 1959), although Panikkar sees the problem as having been more or less automatically resolved at the conclusion of the Second World War. On Kiplings early life, see Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, Chapter 2, and Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, Chapter 1. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (London, 1937), Chapter 1. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, pp 23-25. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, Chapter 3. Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co (London, 1950, original edition 1899). Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies, p 90 See Orwell, Boys Weeklies, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 1, pp 505-31. See HM Green, Kipling as a Journalist, The Australian Quarterly, March 1932, no 13, pp 111-20. For this period in Kiplings life, see Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, Chapters 5-7. 40
ic has a very firm view on the first part of this question: To the average Englishman, Kipling expressed for the first time his own chauvinistic sentiments and ideas in a firm, clear, 29 and colloquial manner. Indeed, already in these early stories is reflected the arrogance and racial supremacism of the Anglo-Indian ruling class. A story such as His Chance in Life, from Plain Tales, contains passages reflecting deep 30 racism. The Head of the District, a later story, reveals 31 Kiplings contempt for the educated Indian. Some critics have claimed that Kipling writes from the point of view of the skilled technicians, artisans, soldiers 32 and lesser administrators those who ran the Empire, yet the ordinary folk depicted in the Indian stories are usually stereotypes and caricatures, like the three oafish soldiers Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney. In The Man Who Would Be King, two ordinary soldiers prove to be without the law when they try to set up a kingdom for themselves 33 in northern Afghanistan, and are deposed. On the other hand, Bobs Lord Roberts, the Army commander-in34 chief in India for many years wins plaudits. There is probably truth in the contention of the Marxist critic of the 1930s Christopher Caudwell that Kipling represents the imperialism of the duped servants of the big bourgeoi35 sie, rather than that of the big bourgeoisie itself. Nevertheless, the values promoted are essentially the same. In any case, Caudwells view does seem more tenable than GK Chestertons notion of a romance of the division of labour 36 and a discipline of all the trades in Kipling. Max Beerbohm, one of Kiplings sternest critics, hit out at the brutishness and excessive stress on a stylised masculinity to be found in Kiplings work. An undercurrent of violence is indeed significantly present in much of Kiplings 37 output. Where he deals with the theme of war in his early material, it is often reflective of notions no doubt developed through the frontier skirmishes of that time, and of the role 38 of the ideal subaltern. As Edward Shanks remarks in his
29. K Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kiplings India (Norman, 1967), p 5. 30. Rudyard Kipling, His Chance in Life, Plain Tales from the Hills (London, 1964, original edition 1890), pp 66-72. Michele was a poor, sickly weed and very black; but he had his pride; he looked down on natives as only a man with seven-eighths native blood in his veins can. (p 68) 31. Rudyard Kipling, The Head of the District, Lifes Handicap (London, 1928, original edition 1891), pp 117-48. 32. See CS Lewis, Kiplings World, in They Asked for a Paper (London, 1962), p 82, and James Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (London, 1975), for whom Kiplings imperial heroes were the doers, the law givers, the governors, the engineers (p 350). 33. Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (New York, 1982), pp 1-36 (originally published 1880-90). 34. Rudyard Kipling, Bobs (1898), Rudyard Kiplings Verse: Definitive Edition (London, 1940), pp 395-96. 35. Christopher Caudwell, Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature (Princeton, 1970), p 83. 36. GK Chesterton, On Mr Rudyard Kipling, in RL Green (ed), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p 294. 37. See Max Beerbohm, Kiplings Entire, Around Theatres (London, 1953), pp 245-49. Two stories illustrating Kiplings evident approval of violence are The Taking of Lungtungpen and The Bronkhurst Divorce Case, both from Plain Tales. See also some of the comments in Robert Graves, Rudyard Kipling, in Edgell Rickward (ed), Scrutinies (London, 1928), pp 74-93. 38. See Michael Edwardes, Oh to Meet an Army Man: Kipling
20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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study of Kipling: The idea of war as a game was never far 39 absent from Kiplings mind and he often urged it. Lionel Trilling, writing in 1943, claimed that Indians naturally have no patience whatever with Kipling and they 40 condemn even his best book, Kim. (Kim was published in 1901.) This state of affairs might have been true at that time, when Congress party leaders were put behind bars for their participation in the Indian independence struggle, yet there are more than a few Indian critics who have in more recent times, while not necessarily forgiving Kipling for his imperialist stance, held up Kim in particular as an outstanding work. K Bhaskara Rao, whom we quoted above, is of the view that Kim is the greatest book on India written by an Englishman, even surpassing EM Forsters A Passage to 41 India, which appeared in the 1920s. Nirad Chaudhuri, an42 other Indian critic, concurs with this assessment of Kim. Yet despite all the praise that has been heaped upon 43 Kim, especially for its many-sided portrayal of Indian life, and its sympathetic characterisation of the Tibetan lama in particular, it nevertheless remains a fact that, stripped bare, the central idea of the novel is to establish the superiority 44 of Kim on grounds of his being white. Kipling himself declared that the novel was nakedly picaresque and 45 plotless. Without the background of the Great Game, and the imperialist theme underlying that, the selfrealisation of the Irish boy Kim as a sahib would not be possible. Kipling had left India for England in March 1889, arriving in October that year. His belligerent attitude was made plain during his world travels in between. He scoffed at the 46 harbour defences of San Francisco after having remarked earlier, concerning the situation in East Asia, that Britain 47 had conquered the wrong country. Let us annex China. The London literary scene he hoped to conquer was at this time dominated by the fin de sicle decadent move-
39. 40. 41. 42.
43. 44. 45. 46. 47.
and the Soldiers, in John Gross (ed), The Age of Kipling (New York, 1972). The code of the subaltern was quite simple selfdenial, law, order and obedience, blessed with the adventurous ardour and audacity of youth. (p 40) See also Boris Ford, A Case for Kipling?, in Eric Bentley (ed), The Importance of Scrutiny: Selections from Scrutiny, A Quarterly Review 1932-1948 (New York, 1964), p 335. Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (London, 1940), p 83. Lionel Trilling, Kipling, in Andrew Rutherford (ed), Kiplings Mind and Art (Edinburgh, 1964), p 88. Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kiplings India, pp 125-65. Nirad Chaudhuri, The Finest Story About India In English, Encounter, April 1957, pp 47-53. See also KRS Iyengar, Kiplings Indian Tales, in MK Naik, et al (eds), The Image of India in Western Creative Writing (Madras, 1970), pp 72-91. Iyengar is also quite rapturous about Kim. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York, 1980), pp 690-864. Ford, A Case for Kipling?, p 327. Kipling, Something of Myself, p 228. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p 91. Quoted in VG Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (Harmondsworth, 1972), p 177. Kipling wrote to the Allahabad Pioneer that the Chinese in Penang were the first army corps on the march of the Mongols. The scouts are at Calcutta, and the flying column at Rangoon. (Quoted in Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1977), p 137) 41
ment, inspired by French aestheticism. The heroes of the day were artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, poets and dramatists such as Oscar Wilde, and critics such as Beerbohm. Their values and interests were diametrically opposed to many of those held dear by Kipling. Kiplings Anglo-Indian reputation had preceded him, and soon his Indian stories and poems became widely popular in England. Kipling came to be seen as the leader of an imperialist school which included other writers such as WE Henley, Rider 49 Haggard and GA Henty. Even from the beginning there was never any consensus in the critical reception Kipling received. The established figures of the decadence looked down upon him with contempt. Wilde, for example, said of Plain Tales that it was as though one were seated under a palm tree reading life by 50 superb flashes of vulgarity. An anonymous reviewer of Departmental Ditties and Soldiers Three, writing in The Athenaeum, did not think much of Kipling as a poet, but thought his stories were comparable with Dickens early 51 52 Sketches by Boz. The Times was impressed. William Butler Yeats, who was probably the most gifted poet of this era, was once invited to discuss Kiplings verse, and he respond53 ed with a raised hand and the two words: That, no Whatever the opinions of select literary circles might have been, it is unquestionable that Kiplings verse output struck a chord with popular taste. Eric Stokes has perceptively written that Kipling deliberately chose to model himself on the ballad-maker who functioned as a vehicle of the 54 55 folk memory and culture. Such rhymes as Gunga-Din 56 and The Ballad of East and West, may be trite and even crude, yet the lore of Empire, which Kipling strove so hard to create, is based in some ways on that kind of crudeness. It is undoubtedly rhymes like these that helped to transform Kipling into a household god, to use George Orwells 57 phrase, among wide sections of the literate classes in England and throughout the British Empire. Kipling himself describes the process by which he came to arrive at his imperialist vision: Bit by bit, my original notion grew into a vast, vague conspectus of the whole sweep and meaning of
48. See Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties (Harmondsworth, 1939), and also AE Rodway, The Last Phase, in Ford (ed), The Pelican Guide to English Literature: From Dickens to Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp 385-405. 49. See JAV Chapple, Documentary and Imaginative Literature 1880-1920 (London, 1970), Chapter 6, and the comparative material in Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Fiction (London, 1967). 50. Quoted in Shanks, Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas, p 3. 51. The Athenaeum, 26 April 1890, pp 527-28. It is of interest to note that this issue of The Athenaeum carried elsewhere in its pages a large advertisement for a sequel to Sir Charles Dilkes Greater Britain. 52. Mr Rudyard Kiplings Writings, The Times, 25 March 1890, p 3. 53. Quoted in JIM Stewart, Eight Modern Writers (Oxford, 1963), Chapter 6. 54. Eric Stokes, Kiplings Imperialism, in Gross (ed), The Age of Kipling, p 94. 55. Kipling, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 406-08. 56. Ibid, pp 234-38. 57. Orwell, On Kiplings Death, p 183.

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things and efforts and origins throughout the Empire. I visualised it, as I do most ideas, in the shape of a semi-circle of buildings and temples projecting 58 into a sea of dreams. His fame assured, Kipling left England in 1892 to live in the 59 USA. He settled in Vermont, and, although circumstances 60 did not prove propitious for permanent residence, it was here that he wrote a number of important works, including the Jungle Books. The latter were published in 1894-95. The Jungle Books The Jungle Books mark a new stage in the development of 61 Kiplings folk ideology. These tales, mostly describing the adventures of a white boy, Mowgli, brought up in the jungle 62 by wolves, are often taken to be simple childrens stories. Yet it is clear enough that they have an adult dimension, and that the author used the medium of the folk-tale to get 63 across some of his central philosophical ideas. Other writers, such as Swift and Twain, in their time used a similar 64 approach to propagate their views. Shamsul Islam has tried to analyse Kiplings Law the animating philosophy perhaps most evident in the Jungle Books, where a strict hierarchy between the different creatures is maintained on the basis of firm adherence to a gen65 erally accepted code. HG Wells saw Kiplings law as a vulgar expression of social Darwinism the law of the strong 66 over the weak. There are militarist overtones in the Mowgli stories: it is no surprise that the themes were taken up by the Boy Scout movement a characteristic product 67 of Kiplings era in the den lore of the Wolf-Cubs. Kipling had an ambivalent attitude to the USA. On the one hand he was impressed by the fact that the Americans had extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more 68 completely than any modern race had ever done. On the other hand, he clashed genially with Theodore Roosevelt 69 over US naval policy, and also wrote the poem An American partly inspired by the Pullman Strike of 1894 which spoke of the cynic devil in his blood/ That bids him
mock his hurrying soul. Later, when the USA seized the Philippines from Spain, Kipling composed the famous po71 em The White-Mans Burden, which, along with A Song 72 of the White Men of the same year, made his racism explicit. Eighteen ninety-seven was the year of Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee. It became the occasion for a major out73 burst of imperial fanfare and celebration. Kipling, back in England, composed the hymn Recessional and it was published in The Times on 17 July of that year. For once the tone of bombast is absent, and Kipling sounds a note reflective of the transience of imperial supremacy: Lo, all our 74 pomp of yesterday? Is one with Ninevah and Tyre. It is not as clear to me as it apparently was to George Orwell that the notorious line in the fourth stanza, Or lesser 75 breeds without the law, refers to the Germans. Even if the line was intended to refer to other Europeans, it would still be objectionable. The Jubilee year and the appearance of Recessional marked perhaps the zenith of Kiplings influence and capacity as an artist. At that time he was, as Samuel Hynes 76 observes, the acknowledged Voice of the Empire. This status did not last, however, and it was the South African War of 1899-1902 which quite dramatically changed popular 77 political attitudes to Empire in Britain, and saw the beginning of a decline in Kiplings own popularity. Kipling and the Boer War The war itself was a classic case of imperialist bullying, and by prosecuting it the British government found itself isolated in world opinion. The Boer republics fought hard to retain their independence, and they inflicted significant defeats on the British army before the latter was able to bring 78 heavy numerical force to bear. Kipling became involved in the war as a frontline correspondent and editor of a British 79 forces journal. He was a friend of both Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson, two figures who loomed large in South African politics, and it has been claimed that Kipling 80 saw himself as the mouthpiece of Rhodes at this time.
70. Rudyard Kiplings Verse, p 185. See the comments in George Shepperson, The World of Rudyard Kipling, in Rutherford (ed), Kiplings Mind and Art, pp 142-44. 71. Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 323-24. 72. Ibid, p 282. 73. See Morris, Pax Britannica, for an overview of the situation at this time. 74. Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 328-29. 75. George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth, 1970), p 185. 76. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton, 1968), p 18. 77. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, sees the war as having become almost as divisive an element in Britain as the Vietnam War in modern America (p 166). 78. On the war, see Elie Halevy, A History of the English People Epilogue, Volume 1 (1895-1905), Book One: Imperialism (Harmondsworth, 1939), Chapter 2. 79. George Shepperson, Kipling and the Boer War, in Gross (ed), The Age of Kipling, pp 81-88. 80. The poem If (Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 576-77), full as it is of public school sentiment, was actually inspired by the character of Jameson, whose ill-starred (no pun intended) raid into Boer territory in 1895 had helped to precipitate the South Afri42
58. Kipling, Something of Myself, p 91. 59. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, pp 135-37. 60. An embarrassing court case involving a relative induced Kipling to abandon his home in the USA. He returned to England with his family in August 1896. See Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, Chapter 11, and Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, Chapter 11. 61. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London, 1894); Rudyard Kipling, The Second Jungle Book (London, 1895). 62. Rosemary Sutcliff, Rudyard Kipling (London, 1960), looks at them mainly from this perspective 63. As Iyengar, Kiplings Indian Tales, notes: In the Jungle Books, Kipling adroitly manages to fuse adventure, fable and primordial myth into stories for children that are often profound enough for the maturest adults as well. 64. In Gullivers Travels and Huckleberry Finn respectively. 65. Shamsul Islam, Kiplings Law: A Study of His Philosophy of Life (London, 1975), especially Chapter 4. 66. HG Wells, The Outline of History, Volume 2 (New York, 1920), pp 423-24. 67. See the Scout Association, Wolf-Cub Handbook (London, 1968). 68. Kipling, Something of Myself, p 123. 69. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p 155.

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Kipling has been described as having regarded the Boers as an obscurantist minority resolved to thwart the essential 81 development of a continent, and in his stories and verse 82 the Boers do appear in a totally negative light. The Absent-Minded Beggar, written by Kipling in 1899 as a fund83 raiser for the war effort, was put to music and widely sung in the music halls, an area of popular cultural expression 84 that often provided a locus for imperialist sentiment. In spite of the eventual military success of British imperialism in its war against the Boers, Kipling was deeply disturbed by the implications of the long struggle involved. He wrote in one poem: We have had an imperial lesson. It may 85 make us an Empire yet! And in The Islanders of 1902, he stirred up a great deal of ill-feeling by berating the alleged complacency and insularity of his countrymen, especially by his unkind reference to the flannelled fools at the wicket 86 or the muddied oafs at the goals. As a result of the Boer War the imperial idea in Britain, in the words of Thornton, suffered a contraction, a loss of 87 moral content, from which it never completely recovered. It is no accident that Kipling now found himself on the extreme right-wing fringe of British politics. One of his biographers has remarked that Kiplings politics were of the purist type, and that he mistrusted politicians in 88 general and Liberals in particular. After the Boer War and until the outbreak of the First World War, Kipling was associated with most of the right-wing causes of the day. The American critic Edmund Wilson claimed that Kiplings artistic output reached a turning point with the Boer War, and that the extremes of jingoism to which he descended after that time marked a qualitative break with 89 his earlier work. Yet none of Kiplings views had changed fundamentally. On Irish Home Rule, for example, an issue that reached explosion point on several occasions in the years before Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Kipling had written a poem as early as 1890 blasting the outcome of a commission of inquiry into the Phoenix Park killings of 1882. Youre only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown, 90 he had intoned. The poem Ulster of 1912, which referred
to Ireland as Englands oldest foe, formed only one part of Kiplings contribution to the cause of the Carsonites and other Unionist opponents of Home Rule. His friend Alfred Milner, of South African fame, organised a British Covenant to back up Carsons Ulster Covenant of 1912. Kipling signed the protest, contributed an article to a magazine launched under the name Covenanter, and also, according to one of Milners biographers, sent the group a sum of 92 30 000. Kiplings anti-Germanism was well known in the years 93 leading up to the war. Yet the seeds of his antagonism to Germany may be found earlier, in the story Reingelder and 94 the German Flag, published in 1892. The influence of Kipling on official government policy at this time is difficult to gauge. But the political divisions of the day were real, and there is no question of a conspiracy by a small group to maintain the cohesion of the British political lite, the existence of which has been seriously 95 alleged. Kipling was associated with the Rhodes Trust, 96 supported the National Service League, was an admirer of 97 Lord Baden-Powell and his work, and continued to strike out against any movement or force which he saw as a threat 98 to the British imperial system. By 1911, therefore, Kiplings accent had lost its lustre, and had become, in the words of Hynes: the snapping and snarling voice of an old Tory dog that grew more ill99 tempered as it lost its teeth. A popular historical work by WH Fitchett, published in 1912, could still carry a dedication on its title page from Kiplings poem The English Flag
81. 82.
83. 84.
85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.
can War. See Kipling, Something of Myself, p 191. On Rhodes and Kipling, see Shepperson, Kipling and the Boer War, in Gross (ed), The Age of Kipling, p 85, and also William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature 1885-1946 (New York, 1949), p 65. Stewart, Eight Modern Writers, p 265. See, for example, A Sahibs War, Andrew Rutherford (ed), Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Volume 1 (Harmondsworth, 1971). The story was originally published in 1901. Kipling, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 459-60. See Colin MacInnes, Kipling and the Music Halls, in Gross (ed), The Age of Kipling, pp 57-61, and also Tony Palmer, All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music (London, 1977), p 91. Rudyard Kipling, The Lesson: 1899-1902, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 299-300. Rudyard Kipling, The Islanders, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, p 302. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies, p 109. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p 256. Edmund Wilson, The Kipling that Nobody Read, The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, 1941), pp 143-44. Rudyard Kipling, Cleared, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, p 230. 43
91. Rudyard Kipling, Ulster, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, p 233. 92. On the Ulster crisis, see George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1972), Part Two, Chapter 2. On Milners activities and Kiplings role, see AM Gollin, Proconsul in Politics: A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (London, 1964), pp 183-86. On Kiplings monetary gift, see John Evelyn Wrench, Alfred Lord Milner 1854-1925 (London, 1958), p 287. Wrench also claims, in the index of his book, that Kipling met Milner annually during this period, although this is not mentioned in the text (p 393). 93. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, pp 183-84. 94. Rudyard Kipling, Reingelder and the German Flag, Lifes Handicap, pp 308-12. 95. See Caroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York, 1981). This must be a minor classic of conspiracy history. The author holds that a secret society set up in the 1890s around the central figures of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner came virtually to control British imperial policy, and much of British political and intellectual life. According to the author: It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-10, it has controlled The Times for more than 50 years, etc, etc. Kipling is roped in as a co-conspirator through his involvement with the Rhodes Trust and membership of the so-called Cecil Bloc. The book was written in the late 1940s. 96. See Edwardes, Oh to Meet an Army Man: Kipling and the Soldiers, p 44. 97. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p 257. 98. His poem The Female of the Species, published at the height of the suffrage agitations by British women, is an example, see Kipling, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 367-69. 99. Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p 19. See also HL Varley, Imperialism and Rudyard Kipling, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1953, p 124.

100 112
of 1891, yet it is without doubt that the poets public reputation had fallen considerably since that piece had originally been published. Kipling had long expected a war with Germany, and he 101 had urged national preparation for it. The logic of interimperialist rivalry, and its ideological expression in racial supremacism and national chauvinism, produced that debasement of spirit common to all the white nations described by Paul Johnson in his book The Offshore Islanders: They began to see each other not as sophisticated human beings but as rival herds of highly-bred animals doomed to slaughter each other like beasts in desper102 ate encounters for the survival of the fittest breed. The First World War was a great catastrophe for civilisation. For Kipling, it was a time of personal tragedy. He lost 103 his only son early in the war. Yet, as Bernard Bergonzi remarks, Kipling became more rather than less belligerent 104 about the war after this loss. His story Mary Postgate of 1915 reveals an almost pathological depth of anti-German 105 sentiment. Kipling continued to do what he could to speed the defeat of the Central Powers, in particular by communicating with his friend Theodore Roosevelt and urging an early US entry into the war on the side of the 106 Allies. In the postwar world, Kiplings literary reputation declined further, as did the popularity of the imperialist ide107 ology he espoused. His stories became increasingly ob108 scure, and a supernatural note obtruded. His racialism, and in particular his anti-Semitic sentiments, was remarked upon by CM Bowra, who visited Kipling in the early 109 1920s. He showed an attraction to Mussolinis regime in 110 Italy, although there were many on the political right, not necessarily fascist themselves, who shared this attraction. 111 He had revealed in a prewar story, As Easy as ABC, a penchant for the authoritarian style of world state, yet there is nothing to indicate that Kiplings world-view could be in any way described as fascist. When Hitler came to power in
Germany in 1933, Kipling began to sound the alarm. However, this stance probably had not much more substance to it than the warnings issued by Churchill, Liddell Hart and others which were largely a response to the threat of German rearmament. Kipling in Retrospect So what of Kiplings standing 50 years after his death? The body of literary criticism indicates that there is no more consensus on this question than existed in the early 1890s. The speaker delivering one Kipling obituary lecture in 1936 proclaimed that it was unnecessary to expose his [Kip113 lings] offences against taste, whereas Orwell, writing a few years later, argued that it was better to start by admitting that Kipling is a jingo imperialist, morally insensitive 114 and aesthetically disgusting. Another critic, AC Ward, damns Kipling with faint praise, describing him as a classic 115 of the second rank. For Shanks, Kipling was an authori116 tarian, he was an imperialist, while to Bonamy Dobree it is Kiplings sensitivity and compassion that deserve to be 117 stressed. For AE Rodway, Kipling was so far to the right that he thought his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, a socialist at 118 heart. Compilers of some broader histories have dismissed Kipling as either an unrepresentative extreme nationalist 119 akin to Germanys Treitschke, or as a minor and essentially propagandist figure to be compared with DAnnunzio 120 and Maurras. Modern critics have tended to divide into two schools, one seeing Kipling as a sociological writer, the other seeing him as a writer who was concerned essentially 121 with the problem of individual alienation. One self-styled Marxist critic, harking back to the days of the Popular Front, concludes his piece with Kiplings ghost resolutely 122 participating in the march of human progress.
112. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, pp 342-43. 113. WL Renwick, Re-Reading Kipling, in Rutherford (ed), Kiplings Mind and Art, p 5. 114. Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, p 184. 115. AC Ward, Twentieth-Century English Literature (London, 1964), p 146. 116. Shanks, Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas, pp vii, 80. 117. Bonamy Dobree, Rudyard Kipling: A New Aspect, The Listener, 12 June 1952, pp 967-68. 118. AE Rodway, The Last Phase, p 388. 119. John Bowle, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), p 351. 120. H Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (London, 1959), pp 41415. 121. The two sides of this critical division are probably best represented respectively in Noel Annan, Kiplings Place in the History of Ideas, Victorian Studies, Volume 3, no 4, June 1960, pp 323-48, and Sandison, The Wheel of Empire, Chapter 4. See also Karl W Deutsch and Norbert Wiener, The Lonely Nationalism of Rudyard Kipling, The Yale Review, Volume 52, no 4, June 1963, pp 499-518, who see the resolution of alienation as a major theme in Kiplings writing. WH Auden, The Poet of the Encirclement, in Morton D Zabel (ed), Literary Opinion in America, Volume 1 (Gloucester, 1968), pp 259-64, is an earlier exploration of a related theme. Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism, shares with Annan the view that Kipling has a close affinity with the Continental sociologists Durkheim and Pareto (p 287). 122. Jack Dunman, Rudyard Kipling Re-Estimated, Marxism Today, 44
100. WH Fitchett, Fights for the Flag (London, 1912). 101. See the excerpt quoted from a letter addressed by Kipling to an American friend living in the occupied Philippines in Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, p 408. 102. Paul Johnson, The Offshore Islanders: Englands People from Roman Occupation to the Present (Harmondsworth, 1975), p 503. 103. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, Chapter 17. 104. Bernard Bergonzi, The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature (London, 1973), p 155. 105. Andrew Rutherford (ed), Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp 80-96. 106. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, Chapter 18. 107. See Kingsley Amis assessment, Rudyard Kipling and His World (London, 1975), pp 90-91. 108. For example The Gardener (1926) in Rutherford (ed), Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Volume 2, pp 203-14. 109. CM Bowra, Memories: 1898-1939 (London, 1966), p 189. Kipling had composed an openly anti-Semitic poem in 1915, in the wake of the Marconi scandal and its aftermath. See Gehazi, Rudyard Kiplings Verse, pp 242-43. See also Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, p 192. 110. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p 300. 111. Rutherford (ed), Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Volume 1, pp 221-52.
The literary legacy of Rudyard Kipling may be clouded by disagreement among critics, but the historical and ideological legacy is relatively clearer. Writing in a fairly recent major biography of Kipling, Angus Wilson makes note of the close links that existed between Kipling and Milners kindergarten intellectuals of the pre-First World War pe123 riod. Wilson declares that Kipling shared their aim of a world federation of Anglo-Saxon countries emerging from the British Empire and based upon full ties of economy and defence but, above all, upon the possession of a common 124 social culture. He might well have substituted the word racial for social. Wilson doubts the depth of Kiplings 125 racism, and observes of Milner and his school: The whole concept of racialist Anglo-Saxon superiority which these clever men truly believed seems now as absurd as it is re126 pugnant. This is a surprising remark to appear in a book published in a year (1977) that saw major street violence in Britain involving the neo-fascist and extreme racialist National Front. The recrudescence of fascism in Britain demonstrates that racism certainly still is strongly evident in England. The racialist content of right-wing politics in Britain has, since the later nineteenth century, never been far from 127 the surface. Kipling, as we have seen from some of his work, shared this racialist sentiment. It is my contention that Kipling sought, through his prose writings and his verse, to give voice to a primitivist folk culture of the Anglo-Saxon race, insofar as there has ever been such a thing. Puck of Pooks Hill, written in 1906, was clearly aimed at evoking a deep-going sense of national identity, particularly 128 among the young. The book fails to achieve its aim however, because the concept of Englishness when used in a racial or folkish sense loses its meaning and no longer describes a nation of people who happen to live in the British Isles, and who share with other nationalities and ethnic groups a common language and to some extent a common culture. Other conservative-oriented writers have attempted to construct a folkish nationalism out of English and British history. For Winston Churchill, it was the Island 129 Race. For Lord Elton, it was the stillborn notion of an 130 Imperial Commonwealth. These days it is the racialist
August, 1965, p 248. 123. Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, p 241. See also Vladimir Halperin, Lord Milner and the Empire: The Evolution of British Imperialism (London, nd), Chapter 5. 124. Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, p 250. 125. Ibid, pp 250-01. 126. Ibid, p 241. 127. Tom Nairn writes that British conservatism has always been profoundly illogical since the time of Edmund Burke, by an instinct rooted in the great historical conditions of its existence (Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1977), p260). Racialism may be seen as a more modern extension of its illogicality. 128. Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pooks Hill (London, 1906). 129. The title of the first volume of The History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples. 130. Godfrey Elton, Imperial Commonwealth (London, 1945). Concerning Oliver Cromwell, Elton writes the Idea for which he sometimes groped was more English even than Protestantism, something primeval and instinctive, something of which he was dimly conscious but did not wholly understand, alien to his own despotism and deep-buried in the folk-mind of the nation (p 66). 45
fantasies of Enoch Powell, or the outright fascism of the 131 National Front and the British Movement. British imperialism could never be a universal solution to any of the worlds problems, nor to the problems of Britain itself. All imperialisms by definition are based on the inequality between ruler and ruled, oppressor and oppressed. Kiplings art, by basing itself so squarely on the fortunes of such a system, inevitably began to decline along with the decline of the Empire itself, as rival powers strove to undermine British hegemony. Kiplings heroic period, the era of Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee and of Recessional, was precisely the period of hubris for Britain as a 132 world power. No one can deny that Britains contribution to civilisation during its period of world hegemony was a very great one: even Christopher Caudwell, the most severe of the revolutionary socialist critics of British imperialism, declared that the Empire builders played a constructive 133 part in the development of capitalism. Nevertheless, the tasks of the day require a radical critique of the imperial legacy, not a celebration of it. Rudyard Kipling will possibly, a few hundred years hence, be remembered as having been associated with certain movements and ideologies connected with the process of transition between two socio-economic systems, capitalism and socialism. By then, with the steam out of the cylinders, it might be possible to sit back and enjoy the Jungle Books as just good stories.
Harry Ratner
A SOCIALIST AT WAR
With the Pioneer Corps
The latest publication from Socialist Platform Ltd, this book covers Harry Ratners time in the British army during the Second World War, including his experiences in Italy and in France and Belgium after D-Day. 8.00 including p+p (UK only, elsewhere details on request). Order directly from the author at 25 Admiral Close, Heanor, Derbyshire DE75 7QH, e-mail [email protected].
131. The ideological origins of the National Front are traced in Martin Walker, The National Front (London, 1976). 132. See Paul Johnsons comments in The Offshore Islanders, p 476. 133. Caudwell, Romance and Realism, p 88.
Reviews
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2009
SHLOMO Sands controversial book, written to debunk popular mythology about the Jewish people and its relation to its Holy Land, has itself created its own mythology among people who dont appear to have read it. Thus Sand is said to deny the right of Israel to exist, on the grounds that the Jewish people of modern times has no genetic connection with the ancient Jewish inhabitants of the land. As a corollary to this, Sands claim that the Palestinians are (allowing for historical admixtures) the genetic descendants of the ancient Jews of the Holy Land (who were, Sand writes, mostly converted to Islam at the time of the Arab conquest of the Holy Land in the seventh century CE) is taken to mean that he is saying that the Palestinians, not modern people identifying as Jewish, are the real Jews. If Sand were actually saying this, it would be easy to argue against him that a) Jewish identity and the connection of Jews with the Holy Land are based upon cultural and spiritual descent, not upon ties of blood and genes; and b) even if it could be proved that modern Jews were genetic descendants of the people exiled 2000 years ago, this would still not be a justification (as Sands alleged argument implies) for establishing a ethnic nation-state based upon driving out most of the people already living in the land. But anyone who actually reads the book will discover that Sand does not at all base his views upon blood and genes on the contrary he is deeply opposed to arguments founded upon racial descent. He is not denying the right of Israel to exist. He believes that however wrong the circumstances of its birth an Israeli-Jewish nation has arisen in the ancient Jewish Holy Land and its existence is a fact of history that cannot and should not be reversed. Nor does he deny that Jewish identity is based upon cultural and spiritual descent. As he pointed out in a recent lecture on his book at SOAS, he is not saying at all that Palestinians are the real Jews and that the people identifying as Jewish today are not authentic Jews. He added that he did not think many Palestinians would agree with this idea either! Indeed, this book, controversial though it is, does not claim to be saying anything new. As Sand writes in his preface: I should emphasise that I encountered scarcely any new findings almost all the material had previously been uncovered by Zionist and Israeli historiographers. Various professors of Jewish history have sneered at the book for its alleged truisms and setting up of straw men. Sand, a professor of contemporary history at Tel Aviv University, is regarded by these experts in Jewish history as a naive encroacher on their territory. But Sand is not writing for these professors. He is addressing the general public, most of whom especially Israelis have swallowed the popular myth of the exiled, miserable, isolated, wandering people the Wandering Jew of Christian mythology who were
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all expelled from their land 2000 years ago, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and have now miraculously returned. As Sand puts it in his preface: What is so amazing is that much of the information cited in this book has always been known inside the limited circles of professional research, but invariably got lost en route to the arena of public and educational memory. My task was to organise the information in a new way, to dust off the old documents and continually re-examine them. The conclusions to which they led me created a radically different narrative from the one I had been taught in my youth. Sand points out that as scholars have always known there was no exile in 70 CE; the Romans never deported whole populations. And he draws attention to something that is again well known to scholars but has never got through to the popular mind that by the first century CE the majority of Jews were already settled outside the Holy Land, and that these Diaspora Jewish communities were mostly communities of people who were originally nonJews but who had converted to Judaism. And Sand points out something that is again known to scholars but contradicts common perceptions that at this time Judaism was an open, proselytising religion that actively sought converts and was in fact immensely popular. Before the rise of Christianity, there was even a prospect of Judaism becoming the main religion of the ancient world. It was only the later persecution and ghettoisation of Jews under Christian rule that led to Judaism becoming a closed, inward-looking religion with a reputation for not welcoming converts, in contrast to Christianity and Islam. Sand writes: The Mishnah, Talmud and the many commentaries are full of statements and debates designed to persuade the Jewish public to accept the proselytes and to treat them as equal. (Here, incidentally, Sand performs a very valuable service in correcting the many current misrepresentations about the Talmud, based on xenophobic statements by some rabbis that are contradicted by many other, very different Talmudic sayings.) Some of the theories that Sand subscribes to are very much in dispute in particular, his adoption of the ideas that the Hebrew Bible was composed during and after the Babylonian Exile, and that the Khazars an early mediaeval kingdom of Turkic-Slavs who converted to Judaism were the main ancestors of East European Jews. But one does not have to agree with all Sands hypotheses to applaud the main purpose of his book, which is to plead for an open, outward-looking, variegated Jewish identity, on the part of both Israeli and Diaspora Jews. This is why the whole book leads up to the fifth, final chapter, which is concerned with modern-day Israel/Palestine. Sand calls for an Israel that is no longer a Jewish State in the current sense of belonging to the Jews of the world and not to its
own citizens, 20 per cent of whom are Palestinians. This is not the same as calling for the end of Israel. Sand points out that Israeli-Jewish national culture which is something very different from the variety of worldwide Jewish cultures would still exist in a bi-national state (which in the book is his solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, though Sand has said in recent talks that, as Israeli Jews will never accept a bi-national state, he now supports a federated two-state solution). Sand explodes the myth of the Jewish and democratic state, pointing out that, in terms of modern Western liberal democracies, in which all citizens, regardless of religion or ethnic origin, are included in the nation, Israel is not a democracy but an ethnocracy. At a time when Israel has built a Wall that is a ghetto
wall for Israel as well as the Palestinians, and is adopting policies that are more and more undemocratic, in order desperately to try to maintain its ethnic Jewish majority, this Israeli Jewish historian pleads for a return to longforgotten Jewish openness to the outside world. A final word of warning: Chapter One, which explores Zionism in relation to the meaning of modern national identity and establishes that all peoples, not just the Jewish people, are inventions is convoluted and rather impenetrable compared to the rest of the book, and might be better skipped out at first and read at the end. The rest of the book written in a style that is often amusingly ironic is compulsive reading. Deborah Maccoby
Letters
Stalinism and Revolution Dear Editors Harry Ratner, in an article in New Interventions (Volume 13, no 2) denying that the Communists could have taken power in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, gives the game away (on page 27, column 1, first full paragraph) when he says: What about the Communist Party? The evidence is clear. They did not aim at revolution. Precisely! Would not, not could not. It might certainly have been impossible when British and American troops were in France, but it would certainly have been possible in 1946; and in Italy, where the rising happened behind German lines and where Togliatti had to be flown from Moscow to stop the revolution, that complication doesnt occur. Ratner says (page 28, column 1, lines 23-41) that Trotsky was attacking Stalin he doesnt stipulate whether in the Third Period, or before or after for not building socialism fast enough. In the Third Period there was a massive advance of state power at the very time that the party was undergoing the most vicious purges and the residual trade unions were suppressed: building socialism? Moreover, during the Third Period, while the Stalinists attacked social democracy as social fascism, they nevertheless made alliances with real fascism. In 1928, in Bavaria, for six months the Communist Party and the Nazis had reciprocal membership. In 1929, in Italy, the Stalinists provided Mussolini with lists of all the names and addresses of socialist and dissident communist parties that they knew. In 1932, in Berlin and Prussia, the Red-Brown Referendum (in which Nazis and Stalinists allied against the Social Democrats) paved the way for Hitler. There were similar alliances elsewhere in the world, particularly in South Africa where the Communists allied with Afrikaner nationalism (they, of course deny it to this day, even claiming that they were allied with African nationalism, but they werent). No need, I hope, to add that both in the period of 192429 and in that of the Popular Front, the Stalinists outside
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the Soviet Union engaged in quite remarkable betrayals of the anti-imperialist movement, not to mention Spain. Then (top of page 29) he makes a distinction between Thorez and Togliatti spending the war years in Moscow and Tillon, Tito and others who acted in illegal conditions. Curious that he doesnt discuss whether this latter activity is related to the fact that Tito was expelled in 1948 for taking power when he wasnt given permission so to do, and that Tillon (with Andr Marty) was ousted four years later. He doesnt notice the fact that where Stalinism did rebel and take power was where wartime conditions had interrupted Moscows communications with local Stalinists (even in Britain, something of this can be seen: Common Wealth was formed from the remnants of the Popular Front, the Left Book Club, when the Communist Party for its own reasons broke contact with its front). Laurens Otter Yugoslavia Dear Comrades As someone who has often read with interest and profit Mike Jones historical analyses of the twentieth-century communist movement (notably the German KPO and left opposition groups) I found his response to my letter about the Serb repression of the Kosovars frankly very odd indeed. It is not his ultra-polemical tone I object to: I have sometimes relapsed into the same more heat than light style myself on occasion. What I find bizarre about his defensive stance on Miloevi and his regime given Mike Jones politics is his virtual whitewash of the corruption and repression of the regime as it morphed seamlessly from being a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia into a radically nationalist Serb state preaching a etnik-style gospel of Serb nationalist expansionism. That is why Miloevi was able to appoint the Serb fascist eelj (who he acknowledges was clearly a nasty piece of work) as his deputy president and that is why he was also able to deploy vicious thugs such as Arkan and his Tiger militias (alongside the remnants of the Yugoslav armed forces) in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in both Croatia and Bosnia. Interestingly Miloevi
was at the same time quite happy to do business with Tudjman and the Croat Ustashe nationalists to try and secure the partition of Bosnia (much in the style of the division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939). I assume many readers of New Interventions will also take with a very large pinch of salt his claim that Miloevi was some kind of Serb working-class hero. Miloevi and his appalling son and family were bandit privatisers on a truly monstrous scale at the expense of Serb workers and their families. That is why they eventually kicked them out in a mass protest movement led by Serb miners and other key groups of workers. Jones has no understanding of why the mass of the Kosovar people supported the resistance (principally but not exclusively the UK/KLA) which in the manner of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan he dismisses as mere criminals involved in drug dealing, murder and such like. Of course at the heart of his problem is that Jones builds his analysis on the simple premise that if the US and the major Western imperialist powers give support to such a resistance movement then our enemys enemy (Miloevi in this case) must be our friend. It is all very reminiscent of the defence of Soviet repression of the national movements in Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere offered even by some Communist Oppositionists in the postwar period. None of this implies some kind of blanket approval for the Kosovar and Bosniak governments. I would point out however that while many Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox), Bosnian Croats (Catholics) and Bosnian Jews fought alongside the Bosniak Muslims to defend Sarajevo, Tuzla and other Bosnian cities against Mladi and his fascist etnik and Arkanite allies, I have yet to hear of the same thing happening in reverse. Jones cannot wash his hands of these facts by recourse to abuse about Guardian sociological trash or my nonexistent support for liberal bombers. He takes his stand with the oppressors. I start with the oppressed. So did Connolly and Pearse when they sought the help of German imperialism in 1916. It may have been an error then and it may have been an error for the Bosniaks and Kosovars to place their trust in Washington and London. But they have the right to win their freedom as they see best. John Palmer Mike Jones replies: John Palmer writes that he is not objecting to my ultrapolemical tone in my previous reply, and admits that he has sometimes been guilty of the same thing fine. Since I began commenting and analysing events in ex-Yugoslavia in New Interventions, I have been accused of taking the Serb side and have been compared to a Holocaust denier. John Palmer himself has written as if I excused terrible crimes and ignored the actions of some of the scum, the vicious thugs who operated in Bosnia and in Kosovo. I have tried to portray events from an internationalist perspective and not fall into a goodies v baddies scenario, which most sections of the left have done. Here in the UK, the Serbs got a bad press on the whole and were blamed for all the evil done and for Yugoslavias break-up and wars. The press went to absurd lengths, such as characterising a Serb mentality, which presumably fitted them all regardless of political philosophy. Some US public relations agency surely came up with that, like so much else. Having travelled extensively in the country, and stayed for months on end, finding friends among many of the various peoples,
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being fascinated by the diversity and encouraged by its development, during the decade of 1966-76, the break-up and wars were both tragic and painful for me. I do not see the creation of a series of Lilliputian states out of the Federation as a step forward for anyone but the new ruling classes and imperialist powers. Im pleased that John Palmer writes that he has often read with interest and profit some of my historical analyses of the twentieth-century communist movement. I share Rosa Luxemburgs criticism of Bolshevism, and in Revolutionary History, Volume 6, no 2/3 (Summer 1996), pp 23147), one can judge. In the Rosa Luxemburg edition of Revolutionary History (Volume 10, no 1, 2009), which I edited, four of her articles that link up Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (1904) with her criticism of the Bolsheviks in power (1918) are assembled, in order to illustrate her outlook and her constant opposition to Lenins organisation methods. For him, the Central Committee is everything, the real party, however, is only its appendage, a soulless mass which moves mechanically at the sign of a leader like an army exercising on the parade ground or like a choir singing according to the conductors baton. In What Next?, no 7 (1990) I introduce August Thalheimers Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin, where I point out that she upheld the dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique in her 1918 criticism. The Thalheimer translation is on the Internet, whether my introduction is I wouldnt know. I mention these translations and introductions so that my views are clear. Yugoslavia came out of the Second World War as a hard-line Stalinist state. It gradually became much more liberal. The 1963 and 1974 constitutions established that it was a federal state of voluntarily united and equal peoples. There were two dozen or so recognised nationalities. The six main nationalities had a republic each, and in 1974 Kosovo was granted an autonomous status within Serbia amounting to de facto republican status, though not de jure. Albanians dominated the structures. Serbs did not dominate Yugoslavia, but were predominant among the military officer class. Talk of a radically nationalist Serb state preaching Serb nationalist expansionism is not true. There were such people, it is true, upholding romantic and mythological nationalist nonsense, but the Miloevi regime did not. It was ruled by the ex-Communist Party, now Socialist Party. Miloevi merely toyed with it. As for Serb expansionism, Ill have to deal with it in detail. The break-up of Yugoslavia was illegal under international law and the Yugoslav constitution. It was a federal state of peoples, the borders internally did not in any way represent national ones. I have previously cited David Owens account in Balkan Odyssey (London, 1995) of how, when he was appointed, together with Cy Vance, CoChairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia in 1992, he discovered that the Dutch government, which had held the EC presidency at the outbreak of war, had suggested, shortly after the Slovenian and Croatian breakaways, that one might explore changes to some of the internal borders between the Yugoslav republics (p 31). He then gives a long quote from the Dutch proposal, which points out that one cannot be selective in the application of principles: self-determination cannot exclusively apply to the existing republics while being deemed inapplicable to national minorities within those republics
(p 32). That owed itself to national minorities existing within the republics, and it stated that the first principle of Helsinki should apply the frontiers of Yugoslavias constituent republics can only be changed in accordance with international law, by peaceful means and by agreement (p 32). Incomprehensibly, Owen continues, the proposal to redraw the republics boundaries had been rejected by all eleven other EC countries (p 33). Owen points out that Milovan Djilas was given the task by Tito of designing the administrative boundaries of the republics and autonomous provinces, and sometimes they were made quickly during a march without the fullest consideration, and were often arbitrary and driven by political expediency (p 34). Djilas told Owen that they were never intended to be international boundaries (pp 34-35). Speaking of the Krajina, the old Habsburg Military Frontier, an autonomous province from these Serb areas in Croatia had been considered but rejected both because of the regions odd intestine-like shape and because of the number of Croats living there (p 35). The boundaries of the republics were not shifted too much as satisfying one nationality would have upset another. It was clear to all concerned that if Croatia broke away, the territory inhabited by 600 000 Serbs would be contested. That is not nationalist expansionism but the very same principle of self-determination as exercised by the Croats, as the Dutch study made clear. The same argument applies to Bosnia-Herzegovina. All the main actors knew that once the process began war would result as territory was seized, and citizens of the rival nationalities would be forcibly removed. Every side did it. Ethnic cleansing was only attributed to the Serb side. Only those of a fierce nationalist bent would see it in that light, soldiers would see it as a military necessity. To avoid an ultra-polemical tone, I wont say that John Palmer is distorting my words, merely that he needs to take more care with quotes. I never said that Miloevi was some kind of Serb working-class hero, merely that he was not a dictator as asserted by most of the British press, but was elected, and he had a base among sectors of workers, peasants and pensioners, who saw him as defending their interests. In my obituary of Miloevi I quoted from James Bisset, who had been Canadas ambassador in Belgrade, who described the former as: an apparatchik and an opportunist interested in holding on to his power, prestige and privileges. He had little interest in a Greater Serbia. As President of Serbia, he was forced to display sympathy to his fellow Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia, but he did not have authority over them. Bissets speech to the foreign policy committee of the Canadian parliament on 15 February 2000 is in Junge Welt (2021 April 2000, pp 10-11), and might be still available on the Internet. Miloevi did not appoint eelj as his deputy because their views coincided, as Palmer claims: it owed itself to a need to rely on his deputies in parliament in order to stay in power. Whether Miloevi deployed thugs like Arkan is doubtful. David Owen wrote that: It will be for the Tribunal to determine who really was in control of the Arkan and eelj irregulars. (pp 301-02) Owen relates the views of Mira Markovi with whom he discussed and who made virulent attacks on nationalist leaders like Karadi, Plavi
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and eelj, also insisting that her husband was no nationalist. Personally I do not believe that he is, he played the nationalist card to gain and hold power. (pp 271-72) I also wrote in my obituary that Miloevi, his family and cronies, supposedly profited from privatisation. From the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, I pointed out that many of the leaders of the new republics had criminal links or were making money out of the wars. Izetbegovi salted money away in an Istanbul bank. Ejup Gani, now under arrest for the massacre of Serb officers leaving Sarajevo under UN protection, and whose sole task was to drag the US and NATO into the war on the side of Bosnia, and who General Sir Michael Rose, UNPROFOR commander at the time, described as without a shred of human decency, who used other people to advance his own wealth and power (Fighting For Peace (London, 1999), p 26), was one of those who profited from the shadow economy when goods and services were unavailable in Sarajevo. Mohammed Sacirbey, Bosnian UN representative, was charged with embezzling government money. Zoran Djindji, the Western-backed replacement for Miloevi, on 5 October 2000, during the coup that ousted him, headed for the National Bank and Customs Service, while his cronies took over privatised companies and state cash-cows. He was a crook, too. Palmer also seems to believe that Miloevi was ousted by a mass movement of workers, including Serb miners. A fantasy he shares with the Socialist Workers Party. Mark Almond, in the Times Literary Supplement (7 September 2001) reviewed 5 October: A 24-Hour Coup, by Dragan Bujoevi and Ivan Radovanovi, translated into English and published in Belgrade. Both authors are DOS supporters, yet their book explodes the naive presentation of that days events in the foreign media. The motivation was not the economic situation, but a key source of Miloevis unpopularity was the string of military defeats suffered by Serbs since 1991: Far from being seen by most Serbs as an ultranationalist, Miloevi was commonly reviled for selling out their brethren in Croatia and Bosnia by signing the Dayton Agreement in 1995 and then withdrawing his troops from Kosovo in June 1999. Television pictures of the crowd storming the parliament in Belgrade showed many Serb nationalist Chetnik flags and banners waved by veterans of paramilitary units and even those accused by NATO of war crimes in Kosovo were present, though not identified by the media. The authors, Almond continues: give details of contacts between Djindji and the security forces. Sveta Djurdevi, a former commander of a special police unit in Kosovo, was the DOS representative for special contacts with the security services Velimir Ili, the mayor of aak, a major smuggling centre on the border with Bosnia, was encouraged by state security officials to bring his convoy of armed men and the famous bulldozer Afterwards Ili thanked the Bosnian Serb militants for their backing. They returned home with their pockets filled with cash, Almond adds. Mihajlo Ulemek, a former comrade-in-crime of the
Mafioso-terrorist Arkan, was a key figure in the storming of the Television Centre The notorious Frenkies, infamous for their criminality in Kosovo, fraternised with the people who stormed the Television Centre. The account admits that: The people of Belgrade swarmed out on to the streets only after the police had changed sides. There were links between these, in part, fake mass movements in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia. George Soros and Western governments were heavily involved in fake NGOs and in financing them. The Washington Post recently published a long account of the scores of millions of dollars paid by the United States to fund democratic change in Serbia and there is little reason to doubt that the CIA added cash to the pile, says Almond, who has written elsewhere about Western observers turning a blind eye to electoral swindles when the right person is elected. Often one gang of crooks replaces another. Can Western ethical principles be fulfilled by such methods, Almond asks: Already, in Kosovo, the West has backed the KLA, despite well-founded evidence of its mafia-like activities, and NATO states also turned a blind eye to the smuggling of cigarettes and of people from Montenegro to Italy, so long as President Djukanovi was the enemy of our enemy, Miloevi. Since the change of regime in Belgrade, Oceania, as it were, has discovered the criminal and terrorist nature of the KLA He reminds readers of the Serb nationalist politics of Djindji, who was later assassinated, and states that he was the last Serbian politician to meet Karadi, in September 1996, in order to support his partys election campaign in Bosnia. Almond attributes the personal demonisation of Miloevi as the reason for the Wests support for such forces, and says that, for those who hoped that a post-Cold War would see the end of Western backing for our son of a bitch, it must be disappointing that Western intelligence agencies have relied on mafiosi and petty warlords to promote our values. The Sddeutsche Zeitung (1 December 2009) reported a man named Nazim Bllaca had come forward and admitted to contract killings, assassination attempts, torture and blackmail, while working for SHIK, the intelligence agency built up by Palmers heroes of the KLA. The article, by Enver Robelli, informs its readers that SHIK was created during the war and afterwards: put into the service of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) of the present prime minister Hashim Thai. The agents were employed for intimidating political opponents and to control the shadow economy. They extracted protection money and occupied the homes of Serbs who were driven out or had fled orders for the contract killings were given directly by Azem Syla and other higher-ranking politicians of the PDK. Syla, former UK General Staff Chief, is regarded as the grey eminence of the guerrilla group. Following the Kosovo War SHIK has, according to Bllaca, killed numerous collaborators of the
Serbian regime, and ill-treated witnesses of the UN War Crimes Tribunal. Officials of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) were also victims. Dr Rugovas party: had won the election numerous times and was seen as the greatest impediment to the former UK rebels taking power. They only succeeded after Rugovas death in 2006. Bllaca confirmed that SHIK had undertaken assassination attempts against political opponents. Since 1999 a number of close confidants of Rugova were murdered, the perpetrators are still unknown. Bllaca, who must have fallen out with someone and be in fear of his life, had previously contacted two MPs who had been associates of Dr Rugova to inform them that various LDK politicians had been on the death-list. He was filmed on a DVD making his statements, and in mid-October it was given to Eulex, the EU body in Kosovo attempting to establish a functioning legal system; it, however, did nothing. Only once the man appeared in public and accused himself did the EU police feel compelled to act. However, two days passed until the alleged contract killer was arrested. Robellis article finishes by stating that the latest Kosovo study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation believes that: The EU mission is continuing the hitherto largely failed policy of the UN administration, which until the declaration of independence in February 2008, had the say in the country. Eulex has hitherto done nothing against the corruption and organised crime. The case of Bllaca is the first big test of the effectivity of the EU mission in Kosovo. Palmer cant see the wood for the trees. He found his bogey men and his heroes and sticks to them regardless. He operates on the surface of events as did the journalists who couldnt see the Chetniks and gangsters prominent in the coup against Miloevi, which he saw as some sort of workers revolt led by Serb miners. Palmer typifies the poor journalism that in the Yugoslav events not only failed to investigate independently, seemingly knew nothing of the history behind them, but instead got attached to PR agencies and government spokesmen. I prefer to uphold the internationalist perspective formulated in the Balkan Federation, of which Victor Serge wrote: The conception was noble: no other remedy was appropriate to the division of the small kindred peoples of the peninsula into feeble states, designed to be destroyed sooner or later through their mutual laceration. (Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1963), pp 179-80) The future of the ex-Yugoslav statelets not already part of the EU is bleak, as enlargement has stopped, it is stagnating with the Euro in crisis and perhaps even being dropped, and risks what the report by a panel chaired by Felipe Gonzlez calls marginalisation, becoming an increasingly irrelevant Western peninsula of the Asian continent. Please note that this correspondence on Yugoslavia is now closed Editorial Board.
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A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion

Volume 13, no 3, Autumn 2010, 2.00

NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 3

Mike Jones, The British People Decide: But What?

Pat Byrne, A New Approach to Europe

Tikva Honig-Parnass, The Limitations of Post-Zionism

Carr Rouge, Thinking About Communism

Harry Ratner, Comments on Thinking About Communism

JJ Plant, Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909)

Paul Flewers, Hitched On His Own Petard

Tawneys Wit and Wisdom

Chris Gray, Second Glance

Graham Milner, Rudyard Kipling and British Imperialism

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Gone For a Soldier

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NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 3

The British People Decide: But What?

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A New Approach to Europe

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Appendix: The Basis for European Unity

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The Limitations of Post-Zionism

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Subscribe to New Interventions

NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 3

Thinking About Communism

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Comments on Thinking About Communism

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Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909)

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Hitched On His Own Petard

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Tawneys Wit and Wisdom

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