Indomitable Revolutionary: Duncan Hallas, A Tribute-By Alex Callinicos John Rudge Laura Miles Dave Sherry Sheila McGregor Jack Robertson Price: £12.00

"When the representatives of the opposition raised the hue and cry that the ‘leadership is bankrupt,' ‘the prognoses did not turn out to be correct,' ‘the events caught us unawares,' ‘it is necessary to change our slogans,' all this without the slightest effort to think the questions through seriously, they appeared fundamentally as party defeatists."

Leon Trotsky

“Trotsky’s assassination ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the 20th century, with far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world socialist movement. And yet, for decades, the circumstances surrounding the assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.”

Duncan Hallas, along with Tony Cliff and 30 others, was a founder-member in the 1950s of a small, anti-Trotskyist political group, which was the forerunner of the current Socialist Workers’ Party (Britain),

This book, published some twenty years after his death, contains a selection of his writings freely available on the Marxist Internet Archive[1] and includes sections written by others about Hallas and his ideas.

Hallas was well thought of inside the SWP. Alex Callinicos wrote in an obituary: “Not for Duncan the abstractions and obscurities of academic Marxism. He wrote plain English, punctuated by short, pithy sentences.” And Paul Foot said, "He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.”

Given Hallas’s popularity, it is perhaps a little perplexing why the SWP waited twenty years to publish this book. The clue may be that it contains many attacks on the Socialist Labour League, the British section of The International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI). It would not have gone unnoticed inside the SWP that today the ICFI, through its publication The World Socialist Website(wsws.org), has undergone a massive increase in its influence and is, by far, the most widely read Marxist-socialist internet-based publication worldwide. The total number of WSWS pages viewed in 2022 was 25,995,248. During the first month of this new year, the World Socialist Web Site recorded 1,882,673 page views.

If Hallas were alive today, he undoubtedly would have authored an attack on the ICFI as he did on previous occasions. Unlike many in the SWP, Hallas was unafraid to get his hands dirty and wrote several unprincipled attacks on the ICFI, particularly the Socialist Labour League. Many of these articles were written not only during an upsurge in the working class but saw an increase in the influence of the Trotskyist movement worldwide.

Hallas’s first attack on the Socialist Labour League came in 1969. His article was called Building the Leadership -“Orthodox Trotskyism” and the Political Roots of the Socialist Labour League[2].

He writes, “ The Socialist Labour League (SLL) is noted on the British Left for the activism of its members and its sharp hostility to all other political organisations. The sectarianism of the League (for example, its refusal to participate in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) and the lengthy polemics carried by its press against more or less obscure “revisionists” are well known. So are the complaints of ex-members of the organisation's allegedly bureaucratic and authoritarian internal regime. But the most characteristic features are the extreme emphasis the SLL places on the twin themes of “leadership” and “betrayal” together with constant predictions of the imminence of catastrophic economic crisis. The SLL claims to be the embodiment of “orthodox Trotskyism”. The claim has considerable justification. The League’s present policies are rooted in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International. Its errors arise from the attempt to apply this analysis to a world situation in which it is irrelevant or false.”

Hallas’s article contains nothing new. It is a rehash of old Stalinist lies under a pseudo-left guise. Hallas inadvertently shows the SWP up for what it is an anti-Marxist and anti-Trotskyist organisation that is wedded to the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy. The article attacks every basic Marxist concept Leon Trotsky fought for, from the Transitional Programme and the Permanent Revolution to the class nature of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s designation of the first worker's state as a Degenerated Workers’ State was rejected, and in its place was Tony Cliff’s State capitalism theory which Hallas completely agreed with.

Trotsky opposed the conception that the USSR represented a variety of "state capitalism" or a ruling class of a new type. He wrote, "The class has an exceptionally important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of national income alone but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundations of society. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule”.[3]

As an article by the Marxist writer Peter Daniels points out, Cliff’s theory was hardly original,  “Cliff developed his version of the theory of Soviet state capitalism in 1948. He added little to the arguments made in favour of the theory years earlier. As far as Cliff was concerned, the destruction of the Soviets and the loss of political power by the working class meant that the ruling bureaucracy, presiding over the rapid industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan, had been transformed into a ruling class of state capitalists. As we discussed briefly, Trotsky had answered these arguments many years earlier. Cliff never explained how the ruling caste, with no right of inheritance and no special property relations, had become a ruling class. Cliff's abandonment of the theory of the degenerated workers' state had a definite political significance. It represented a capitulation to the ideological and political pressure of "democratic" capitalism in response to the difficulties faced by the revolutionary movement.

Just as Shachtman had adapted to the moods among petty-bourgeois intellectuals at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Cliff and his supporters adapted to the pressures of the Cold War. Quite simply, they found it too difficult and uncomfortable to defend Marxism in the face of the anti-Communist campaign of this period. Only the genuine Trotskyists were able, as Cannon put it so well in The Open Letter, to fight imperialism without capitulating to Stalinism and to fight Stalinism, in the final analysis, a petty bourgeois agency of imperialism, without capitulating to imperialism.”[4]

As was said earlier, Hallas completely agreed with Cliff’s attack on Leon Trotsky. Hallas‘s book Trotsky's Marxism 1979 further elaborates the SWP’s bitter hostility towards Trotsky and the very founding of the Fourth International.

Hallas’s book contains so many attacks on Trotsky and Trotskyism it is hard to know where to begin. As Daniels writes, “One could not ask for a more explicit repudiation of Marxism. His outlook sums up the "tactical opportunism" of the state capitalists. Seeking to root themselves in the British working class based on partial demands, not an international program, is how they have functioned all these decades. "Rank-and-files" and collaboration with the bureaucracy in the trade unions; single-issue middle-class protest as in their Anti-Nazi League of the 1970s and 1980s; collaboration today with Tommy Sheridan and Scottish nationalism, and with George Galloway in the Respect electoral coalition”.

While it is impossible to cover every rotten attack by Hallas mentioned in the book and elsewhere, it would be amiss of me not to highlight and oppose the scurrilous attack made by Hallas and the SWP on the ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International investigation. In an article published in 1985 entitled Workers Revolutionary Party Cult comes a cropper[5]. Hallas writes, “The loving up to various dictators in the Middle East, the ‘imminent danger of Bonapartist police dictatorship in Britain, the grotesque Security and the Fourth International campaign – aimed at the now deceased Joseph Hansen and the SWP US.

In 1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International launched the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination. This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, exposed the network of GPU and American intelligence agents within the Fourth International that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life and facilitated state surveillance in the following decades. The investigation was bitterly opposed by Pabloite and pseudo-left organisations, like the Socialist Workers PartyUK, which denounced the exposure of spies inside the Trotskyist movement as “agent-baiting.” This has remained their position, even though state intelligence documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirmed the findings of the International Committee and vindicated Security and the Fourth International.[6]

Indomitable Revolutionary by Duncan Hallas is not only a worthless book. It contains numerous attacks not just on Leon Trotsky but on the heritage of Trotskyism, in Britain and worldwide. Therefore, I have included a list of books that should be consulted when examining the heritage we defend.

 

Further Reading

The Heritage We Defend: Contribution to the History of the Fourth International Paperback – 1 Dec. 1988 by David North

Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century-David North

The Revolution Betrayed-Leon Trotsky

Security and the Fourth International-ICFI-Mehring Books

Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement-Eric London

How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism-1973 — 1985 -Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International

 

 

 

---

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/index.htm

[2] International Socialism (1st series), No.40, October/November 1969, pp.25-32. Marxists’ Internet Archive.

[3] The Class Natureof the Soviet State (October 1, 1933)- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm

 

[4] The Revolution Betrayed and the fate of the Soviet Union

Peter Daniels- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/rev1-f25.html

[5]From Socialist Review, No. 82, December 1985, p. 25.

Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/icfiCategory/security

David North - Trotsky, Austromarxism, Imperialism, Capitalism, against P...

Free—Coming of Age at the End of History, Lea Ypi. £20.00

“I got to Marx from Hegel and Kant. A lot of people asked, ‘How could you be interested in Marx, given your family background?’ My mother was completely obsessed with worry . . . But for me, it was hard to say, ‘I’m turning back because my family wouldn’t like this.’ I wanted to explore these ideas. For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy, in a way.”

Lea Ypi

“One of the things people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare Socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But you are not comparing like for like.”

Lea Ypi

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the sheer volume of praise and recommendations before one has even read a word, four pages, to be precise. Either this is the work of a budding genius, or quite a few people have lost their intellectual sanity.

The second thing about the book is the title- Free—Coming of Age at the End of History. A cursory look inside the book will tell you that this is not a philosophical memoir. It is barely a political memoir. The title alludes to the neoliberal champion Francis Fukuyama. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History uses a loose version of Hegel’s idealist phenomenology. Fukuyama announced that the tired march of history had arrived at its final station—a US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market. This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics, always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning side of history. Whether Ypi, now a political philosophy professor at LSE in London, believes this is the “End of History” as we know it remains to be seen.

She has, however, become a darling of the petty-bourgeois left. The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP) believes she is an “avowed Marxist. In the review by Gareth Jenkins, he writes, “If you believed in ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ during the Cold War, what’s not to like about Lea Ypi’s autobiography? “.

The SWP professes to be a Marxist organisation. Still, one wonders how many of its members have been taken to lunch at an expensive restaurant by the Financial Times, the leading financial organ of the British bourgeoisie, or had a whole-page interview as Lea Ypi was given in the same newspaper.

The book is not without merit. It is well-written and shows what life was like growing up in Stalinist Albania. The book is written through the eyes of a young person growing up trying to make sense of the world around her. At one point, she writes, “I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.”  However, this “avowed Marxist” has little or no understanding of the complex phenomena of Stalinism, How it arose and how to combat it. I doubt also she has read any of the works of Leon Trotsky. While criticising her former society for contradicting the Marxist idea of freedom, she opposes the conception of Socialism if “brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, and the right combination of theory and practice”, would succeed.

Any reader looking for a worked-out revolutionary solution to mankind's problems should perhaps give this book a miss. Her course at the London School of Economics starts with the premise that “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, and how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.”

The goal of human freedom and a free society, which many great revolutionary thinkers wanted, cannot be achieved by having some vague notion of behaving better or having a mild critique of capitalism and then hoping for the best. It can only be completed in the words of  Nick Beams, “if the tyranny of global capital and its rule through the “free market” is overturned. It must be replaced by a social system in which the productive forces, created by the intellectual and physical labour of working people the world over, are harnessed by them to meet their needs”.

 

  

Comments on academia.edu on Gardiner and Everitt

Fri, 21 Jul at 19:35

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

It is interesting that Gardiner anticipated Everritt's argument about the insularity of county communities. Both historians raise issues that not only deserve serious consideration but have received considerable attention since the 1970s. On common sense grounds we might expect that members of a predominantly agricultural society, in which wealth and social position derived primarily from ownership of land, and in which travel was also much slower and more difficult than today, to adopt a localist outlook. And if their participation in governance took place within the framework of a county, and their social alliances also tended to remain county-centered (as Everitt claimed to demonstrate), that would further reinforce their localism. The issue is how far these assumptions were actually true, and to the extent that they were not true, what features of early modern society broke through the insularity? Post 1970s historiography offers a number of answers, beginning with the stress of Clive Holmes and others on the importance of the centralized legal structure of English government, which made it impossible to ignore the political center entirely, and extending to the work of a number of scholars on printed controversy, the circulation and packaging of news, and the putative emergence of a 'post-reformation public sphere'. We might add other facets of early Stuart society that arguably have not received enough attention: the role of great nobles and their affinities, whose horizons transcended county boundaries; the importance of professional groups like lawyers and clergymen -- but arguably also clothiers, sailors and even peddlars, whose work brought them into contact with wider environments; the importance of London and other trading cities as hubs of information and nodal points of wider networks. While acknowledging the undoubted contributions of Gardiner and Everitt, we need to recognize that in important ways the discussion of the issues their work raises has moved on since the 1970s. What we now need to evaluate is how far these newer layers of historiography provide convincing answers to our questions about the reputed insularity of local communities, how they may still be lacking, and what new questions and avenues of research we ought to be pursuing.

Christopher Thompson

5 days ago

This is a very interesting and challenging comment, Malcolm. In the late-1960s, I took the view that a revised account of the Court-Country scheme of analysis was needed. One could look at the Court (a) as the centre of policy making in secular and religious matters (b) as the administrative apparatus stretching out from Westminster to the counties, corporations and localities of England and Wales and (c) as a cultural and social institution. Those who were involved with the Court in one of these senses might have been opposed to it or critical of it in another. It seemed to me then that this might avoid some of the analytical difficulties arising from the work of Trevor-Roper, Stone, Zagorin and others. I still think this approach has some utility. Within local communities, there was a range of responses to the demands of the 'political Court' which involved bargaining and negotiation, complaint, conflict and compromise. Conrad Russell was mistaken in supposing that Parliament was alone in its involvement in these relationships between successive monarchs and the Court on the one hand and the Country, including local communities, on the other. As Caroline rule became more authoritarian, opportunities for bargaining and negotiation narrowed by 1640. Clive Holmes, whom I first met in 1966 or 1967, was actually heavily influenced at that time by Everitt's approach although, by c.1980, he was much more critical. News was clearly conveyed across the country not just by newsletter writers but by other means as well, including oral transmissions as the cases in many Assize Court and Quarter Sessions' cases show. London as the major urban centre in the country clearly differed in its social composition and reactions to royal policies from many other localities. Obviously, the areas of historical enquiry have altered greatly since 1884 or 1967. But I was surprised to see how far Gardiner almost one hundred and forty years ago had anticipated what Everitt was to claim. These issues need further consideration. (My piece does not seem to have been reproduced as I uploaded it.)

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

I agree that the court-country thesis needed more careful parsing and analysis. In addition to your comments, which I find persuasive, I've also stressed the distinction between the actual court and the court as an image or cultural trope, which figured in contemporary polemic but which also did not correspond to actual conditions in any simple manner. One of the glaring problems with Stone's account was his failure to make this distinction. I'd also add (and suspect you would agree) that 'country' opposition to higher taxation was not perfectly aligned with 'puritan' resistance to Laudian innovations and unhappiness with the absence of a more active policy in support of Protestant interests in Europe. If anything, 'country' desire for a cheaper and less intrusive court was implicitly at odds with the European ambitions of people like Warwick (and many of the Scottish Covenanters, for that matter). And in terms of personnel, we need to keep reminding ourselves that the groom of the stole and two successive lord chamberlains backed Parliament in 1641-2: the court was as divided as many counties. Indeed the fact that the court was internally divided, with many of its key members convinced that Charles needed to be forced to change course, was crucial to the strategy of the parliamentary leadership in the early months of the Lond Parliament. They did not want to replace the court but hoped instead to take it over, and thereby to hem Charles in to a point at which he would have no choice but to conform to their demands; and for a time they appeared to be succeeding. Seeing the Civil War as the outcome of a binary contest between the king, court and reactionary aristocracy and a gentry, puritan, country opposition leads to all kinds of distortions.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

I do agree, particularly on the point you make about the role of the 'Court' and the distinction to be made with its image. Hexter made the comment many years ago that opposition to royal policies in the State did not necessarily align with opposition to royal/Laudian policies in the Church. But gaining control of the direction of policies in Church and State could only be done by reducing the role of Charles I to that of a Doge of Venice, something the King would and could never accept. The peerage was by no means reactionary in my view but had benefited from a notable strengthening of its economic position since the 1580s - here I prefer W.R.Emerson's analysis - a point that Lawrence Stone's incidental comments in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 actually appear to support. The recent research on the subject of neutralism and coat-turning in the Civil Wars of the 1640s does confirm your observations.

 R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

I think we are in substantial agreement. Part of the problem in 1641 was that the only way to control Charles was to hem him in completely, isolating him from anyone who might encourage and help carry out an effort to re-assert his total control and punish his enemies. (It's tempting to compare him to Donald Trump in this way, even if Charles was a far more cultivated man on a personal level). To do that, in turn, required ruthless tactics to eliminate or intimidate strong royalists, including the use or threat of impeachment and the encouragement of crowd actions that implied a physical threat to the safety of the royal family. This in turn provoked a backlash that extended even to some people initially supportive of the Long Parliament's agenda, while lessening inhibitions against the use of equally ruthless tactics by the king's partisans. That created a dynamic that corroded, even if it never entirely eliminated, commitment to the rule of law, non-violent forms of governance and civic peace, while empowering men on both sides who were prepared to mobilize and use coercive force. On one level this was a new version of the old problem of how to control an unacceptable king without creating even worse problems and more chaos than his misrule had produced. Parliament's leaders tried to erect institutional and legal safeguards, in ways that went far beyond any of the baronial rebellions of the Middle Ages. But these failed to prevent a ruthless political contest that ultimately had to be decided by the sword, and that ultimately destroyed the existing system of English governance, including the role of Parliament, producing a military state lacking in any sense of legitimacy beyond a shrinking cohort of its own followers. And then to the attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after 1660.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

This is undoubtedly correct. I have some suspicions that the deployment of mob violence against supporters of the King, the Bishops and recalcitrant supporters of the royal regime in London was rather less spontaneous than Manning or later Marxists supposed. Valerie Pearl did not thinks so and there is a body of evidence to show that the 'great contrivers' were better acquainted with more radical Londoners than usually supposed. The major figures in the Long Parliament knew, pace Kishlanky, that Charles I was untrustworthy and would not keep to any settlement that might have been reached. In due course, the violence of the Civil Wars and Irish/Scottish imbroglios led to an outcome in which the post-1646 regimes rested in the last resort on force and lacked the degree of consent necessary to consolidate their rule. This problem was never resolved and led in 1660 to the Restoration. The constitutional and religious problems exposed after 1640 took several more decades to resolve.

R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

Yes, the parliamentary grandees sought to use crowd actions and threats of crowd violence as weapons to intimidate the king, queen and others. I strongly suspect they also hoped to ramp up or tramp down religious hostility to the queen to pressure her into pressuring Charles to acquiesce to their demands. But it must have been very hard to keep control of the crowds and religious passions once they had been unleashed. My reading is that some people -- especially those involved in the First Army Plot -- were initially inclined to advice Charles and HM to compromise but drew back when they concluded that the parliamentary leadership had unleashed mob violence it would be unable to restrain, leaving a royalist counter-strike as the only viable option. U developed this interpretation in my contribution to the collection on Royalists and Royalism edited by Jason McElligott and David Smith with CUP in 2007.

Christopher Thompson

2 days ago

I see the force of this argument and why the members/leaders of the Junto felt it necessary to use force to compel the King to make concessions that would have left him effectively powerless in a revised constitution. Whether they judged that Charles would ever have accepted such a settlement is another issue. Mobs could be mobilised and de-mobilised as some of the work on the French Revolution has shown. Your essay in the McElligott-Smith volume is an impressive analysis - I have been working on its immediate predecessor for some while.

R. Malcolm Smuts

19 hrs ago

I'll be interested to see what you come up with. Up to a point mobs could be mobilised and demobilised, but they were also capable of taking on a life of their own (like armies), as contemporaries realized. I do wonder how far the 'revised constitution (a term no one in the seventeenth century would have used) was considered an end in itself, rather than a set of improvised measures to deal with the problem of a wayward king. No doubt a bit of both. I've long felt that the traditional historiography on the outbreak of the Civil War over-emphasizes the reasoned pursuit of constitutional measures, while understating the degree to which contemporaries knew they had been drawn into a ruthless and dangerous political contest, in which their lives were often at stake, whose ultimate outcome was very hard to foresee because the measures needed to deal with the immediate crisis risked generating new crises down the road. The constitutionalist view makes the contest seem more polite and principled but also less fraught and exciting than it really was. Russell and Adamson have gone some way to redress the balance.

Christopher Thompson

7 hrs ago

Let me begin by commenting on how well connected the 2nd Earl of Warwick was with the leaders of the radical cause in London. Of its four M.P.s in the 1640s, Cradock and Venn were almost certainly known to him because of his and their role in founding the New England and Massachusetts Bay companies: Samuel Vassall held land of Warwick in south-east Essex and Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the people who supported Samuel Hartlib. Warwick's brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645 and associate in the affairs of the Somers Island Company was Owen Rowe. Warwick had owned a house in Hackney until at least 1634 and did own one at Stoke Newington. His shipping interests gave him extensive contacts with the seamen of London before and after 1640. I suspect there are grounds for thinking that Warwick and his allies like Saye and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke had the contacts to concert demonstrations in and around Whitehall. All three men had been prepared in principle to support the use of armed resistance to royal authority since 1634 as their contacts with Connecticut and Massachusetts indicated. We can find expressions of deep hostility to royal and ecclesiastical authority in the works of Warwick's clerical allies like Nathaniel Barnard and Jeremiah Burroughs well before 1640. They were, moreover, careful to cover their tracks in their dealings with Irish and Scottish opponents of the Caroline regime but left just enough traces elsewhere to offer indications of their plans. I am sorry to say that Conrad Russell's analysis of the pre-1640 schemes of these men is fundamentally implausible and completely untenable. That their lives were on the line after the spring and summer of 1640 was, I would maintain, clear to them and their allies: they were well acquainted with King Charles I's vindictiveness towards critics and opponents of his rule. As a result, they had to bind him so fast that he could never free himself from the restraints they aimed to impose on him as Pym's remarks in the Plume Mss indicate.

R. Malcolm Smuts

1 hr ago

I find this entirely persuasive. These connections need more emphasis. Adamson's book seems to me to do a better job than Russell's in bringing out the role of the aristocratic opposition to Charles, but I'm sure there is more work to be done in this area. I've long thought -- and I wonder if you would agree -- that someone needs to bridge the perspectives of Adamson's __Noble Revolt__ and Cressy's __England on Edge__. I once said this to Cressy and he seemed to agree. Asking whether the revolt against Charles was popular or aristocratic in nature is the wrong question. It was obviously both at once and the challenge is to explain how the two dimensions were integrated. But I would also continue to maintain that no matter how extensive and effective the networks of Warwick and his allies undoubtedly were in mobilizing and steering popular protests, crowd actions were always inevitably difficult to control in the long run, and the process of tying a king's hands was fraught with all sorts of risks, as earlier English history demonstrated in ways that people like Warwick would have appreciated. As I'm sure you know, Warwick told the Dutch envoys who accompanied William to London for his marriage with Princess Mary that he was too busy trying to prevent the outbreak of civil war to attend on them properly. He knew he was playing with fire, because he had no choice, but that didn't make his actions any less dangerous. The return of soldiers from European campaigns to fight on both sides of the Bishops' Wars compounded the problem.

Peter Paccione

4 days ago

It's my impression that it was common throughout early modern England for people to refer to their counties as "countries." It wasn't unique to Kent.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

Yes but Everitt's argument that this put Kent's interests before those of England was not convincing then or now.

Fortunately, there is surviving evidence on Warwick's ability to control very large crowds with a propensity to some violence. In the 1628 county election for Essex, about 15,000 freeholders assembled at Chelmsford (according to JohnPory) and returned the candidates Warwick supported despite the efforts of the Privy Council and the J.P.s of the county. If Pory was right about the numbers present, this would have represented about a quarter of all the adult men in Essex. In March, 1640 at the county election again in Chelmsford to the Short Parliament, it was clear a very large number of men were present and that threats of violence were made against the candidate or candidates endorsed by Lord Maynard, Henry Neville of Cressing Temple and probably by Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury. Sir William Masham's very brief reported comments in the House of Commons suggest that Neville had had the support of the Privy Council and of the magistrates in an attempt to defeat Warwick's allies. Warwick himself played a key role in managing the outcomes in both cases. It is likely that the supporters of his candidates were mobilised across Essex by his gentry allies, by his and their tenants, sympathetic clergymen and figures in the county's boroughs. Warwick's manor of Moulsham Hall was probably the base where these supporters were fed and watered. These outcomes hint at a degree of co-ordination across the county. The petition submitted to the Short Parliament from Essex in April, 1640 may have been signed then: that for Hertfordshire (and just conceivably the summary one from Northamptonshire) is clearly related. Later petitions from Essex to the Long Parliament were presented with a significant number of supporters brining them up. I have had some interesting conversations over the years with John Walter on how Warwick's control of the county was exercised in the 1640s. It also seems likely to me that Warwick's mercantile and clerical contacts were brought into play in the petitioning manoeuvres and demonstrations in 1641-1642 in the capital. He was undoubtedly aware of Charles I's deep antagonism to critics and opponents of his authoritarian rule as the case of Sir John Eliot indicates. That Charles would take revenge if he could must have been obvious to the Junto from the summer of 1640 if not before. They had to tie his hands so firmly that that would never be possible as Pym's recorded comment in the Plume Ms. notebook suggests. Warwick, Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke and their allies in the House of Commons and beyond were at risk of their lives as you rightly state. 

S.R.Gardiner’s anticipation of the ‘county community’ hypothesis-Christopher Thompson

 Several decades ago, Alan Everitt argued in his study of the county of Kent that its rulers formed a community of their own, that this community was distinct from that of other counties and that, when its leaders spoke of their ‘country’ they meant Kent rather than England. It was in reaction to the demands of the King and his Privy Council that the community of Kent shaped its political and religious responses and that this form of localism helped to explain the antecedents and outbreak of the English Civil War or Revolution.

There is no doubt about the stimulus that this hypothesis gave to the investigation of county histories across the period. The works of Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill and the late Clive Holmes testify to its impact. In historiographical terms, it was highly significant in the late-1960s and 1970s, even though its influence has now faded.

At that time, I was sceptical partly because this argument did not appear to have medieval antecedents and did not feature in the case of the counties I was then studying. What I had not appreciated was that, in some respects, Everitt’s argument had been anticipated by S.R.Gardiner in his volume on the History of England between 1639 and 1641. He had written there that, in 1639. Both Charles and Wentworth under-estimated the strength of the opposition against their policy too much, to make them even think of recurring to violence. Nor is it at all likely that even those who felt most bitterly against conscious the Government were aware of how strong was their position in the country. In the seventeenth century, when Parliament was not sitting, our ancestors were a divided people. Each county formed a separate community, in which the gentry discussed politics and compared grievances when they met at quarter sessions and assizes.

Between county and country, there was no such bond. No easy and rapid means of communication united York with London, and London with Exeter. No newspapers sped over the land, forming and echoing a national opinion from the Cheviots to the Land's End. The men who begrudged the payment of ship-money in Buckinghamshire could only learn from uncertain rumour that it was equally unpopular in Essex or in Shropshire. There was therefore little of that mutual confidence which distinguishes an army of veterans from an army of recruits, none of that sense of dependence upon trusted leaders which gives unity of purpose and calm reliance to an eager and expectant nation.

Gardiner’s claim anticipated the arguments that Everitt was to put seven decades later. I am not sure that either was correct. Similar demands were made of each county from the ‘political Court’ at the centre and were the subject of bargaining and negotiation, of compromise and conflict. These common experiences were felt across England and Wales. Newsletter writers like Mede, Pory and Rossingham made them widely known as the testimonies of men like John Rous and Walter Yonge showed. The carriers of goods and people conveyed news more widely than Gardiner appreciated in this passage.

When I was a postgraduate, I was often doubtful about the analysis of the past in the works of previous generations of historians. Since then, I have come to understand how perceptive they often were and that important insights remain to be found in their works. Gardiner and Everitt may not have been precisely right in their conclusions but it is striking how similar their formulations were. I shall go on reading the works of previous historians in the hope of gaining better insights into the lives of early modern people in the future.

16 July, 2023

 

 

All the Lovers in the Night, Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett (trans), David Boyd (trans) (Europa Editions, Picador, May 2022)

 “In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way.”

All the Lovers in the Night

‘I want to write about real people,’

Mieko Kawakami

“There are just as many memories as there are people, so there’s no correct version of one event. That’s why we need many different kinds of voices and experiences, and by reading those voices, we understand and construct a bigger picture of the world.”

Mieko Kawakami.

“Those Who Fight Most Energetically and Persistently for the New Are Those Who Suffer Most from the Old”

Leon Trotsky

All the Lovers In the Night is Mieko Kawakami’s third novel. The book covers similar ground to her previous books, " Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. All three books were translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, with Breasts and Eggs having sold over 250,000 copies in thirty countries. Kawakami’s novels have come under sustained criticism from Japanese conservatives,  Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former governor and a former novelist, called them “unpleasant and intolerable”.

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important writers to come out of Japan. Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her family were working class and poor. She was forced to work in a factory at the age of making heaters and electric fans. Later she had a job as a hostess and a singing career, finally becoming a blogger and a poet. She has almost single-handily dragged Japanese literature into the 21st century. She won many awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, in 2008. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important Japanese novelists, praised the writer, saying Kawakami  is “always ceaselessly growing and evolving.” However, Kawakami has not always liked  Murakami's portrayal of women.[1] In a 2017 interview with Murakami, she opposed his perceived sexism, saying, “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function” and “Women are no longer content to shut up,”

All the Lovers in the Night covers the life of a working-class Japanese girl, Fuyuko Irie, a proofreader in Tokyo. Fuyuko is a typical character used by Kawakami, a person who is single, childless, largely a loner and travels through life unnoticed and unloved.

As Fuyuko Irie says, “What I saw in the reflection was myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at the age of thirty-four. Just a miserable woman who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on her own in the city, desperately hugging a bag full to bursting with the kind of things that other people wave off or throw in the trash the first chance they get.”

There is cleverness in how “All the Lovers in the Night” addresses all the changes in the book's main protagonists. Kawakami never judges her characters and empathises with them/. As Joshua Krook writes, “If there is a core question in Kawakami’s work, it is what the oppressed should do to feel okay with themselves. Most of her stories feature people who are ignored or mistreated by society, with many having psychological problems stemming from their mistreatment. The protagonists cling onto one or two people as lifelines that keep them afloat in the storm.”[2]

Kawakami’s Treatment of Irie’s alcoholism is particularly sensitive. Alcoholism seems to be a major problem in Japanese society. Just typing in Google search engine for alcoholism amongst young Japanese women brings up many articles.

A recent study found that “young Japanese people drink much more alcohol than the global average. In 2020, 73 per cent of men aged 15 to 39 in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol compared to 39 per cent of their male peers globally. The difference was even starker for Japanese women: 62 per cent of women aged 15 to 39 years in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020 compared to just 13 per cent of young women globally.”[3]

Kawakami is not shy about discussing subjects barely mentioned in Japanese or, come to that matter, in Western Society, such as social class and gender. Her treatment of sexual violence towards women is one such issue. As Cameron Bassindale writes in his book review, “It reaches a nadir in tone when Kawakami produces a chapter detailing sexual violence which is so visceral and believable it will leave those weak of temperament wondering why they ever picked up this book. That is to say, Kawakami has truly outdone herself, surpassing even her lofty expectations of creating a narrative which is immediate and realistic; this English translation is a gift to anyone wishing to understand life for the modern Japanese woman and the perils and hardships many women face. Of course, no two human experiences are the same, and that point is apparent in the contrast between the female characters in the novel; however, the space between men and women in the book tells the state of gender relations in Japan. It is up to the reader to draw their conclusions.”[4]

Several middle-class reviewers like Mia Levitan have sought to position Kawakami as some “literary feminist icon”. Levitan writes, “ Anti-heroines aching for erasure may point to a broader unease. Kyle Chayka, the author of The Longing For Less (2020), posits that a modern desire for nothingness stems from overstimulation. Or it may be a reaction to “girl-boss” feminism. “Instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our throats . . . I think feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is hard,” suggests Audrey Wollen, the Los Angeles-based artist who became known in 2014 for her “Sad Girl Theory”, which reframes sadness as a form of protest.”

A turn towards feminism cannot solve the problems women face in Kawakami's books or in real life. The plight of working-class women in Japan or anywhere else is inseparably linked to the plight of the working class.

As Kate Randall correctly points out, “The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle.As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”[5]

All the Lovers in the Night is well-written, eminently readable, and sometimes beautiful. Although largely written about womanhood, it is still a great novel, and one looks forward to Kawakami’s future work.

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[1] A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself- https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/

[2] https://newintrigue.com/2021/06/18/the-writing-of-mieko-kawakami/

[3] Population-level risks of alcohol consumption by amount, geography, age, sex, and year: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2020- www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext

[4] bookmarks.reviews/reviewer/cameron-bassindale/

[5] The condition of working-class women on Internation

Karl Marx- Critique of the Gotha Program-Translated Karel Ludenhoff and Kevin B. Anderson, PM Press/Spectre, Oakland, 2022. 128 pp., £15.99 pb

 “The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labour, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand—as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boardinghouse—any control except that of education, habit and social opinion”.

Leon Trotsky

‘you gentlemen who think you have a mission

to teach us of the 7 deadly sins

should first sort out the basic food position

then do your preaching that’s where it begins’

(Brecht, Three Penny Opera)

This new edition of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which comes with a new translation,should be welcomed.

At the beginning of the 1870s, there were two main socialist parties in Germany. The Social Democratic Workers Party founded by Karl Marx’s collaborator, Wilhelm Liebknecht, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, and the General German Workers Association was founded by the late Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.

Marx’s criticism of Lassalle contained in Critique of the Gotha program was not episodic but was profound and had far-reaching significance for the German (and international) workers movement. Marx’s letters to Engels on the subject of Lassalle, and, for that matter, his direct correspondence with Lassalle, retain immense political and theoretical use.

According to a document of the founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany), “ the SPD was never a homogeneous party. The unification conference in 1875 in Gotha made numerous concessions to the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle, who had died in 1864. Marx sharply criticised the Gotha Programme, which he accused of being “tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. Lassalle had wanted to establish socialism with the help of the Prussian state, which he regarded as an institution standing above the classes. He had even met secretly with Bismarck in order to exploit the latter’s conflicts with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the working class. Lassalle justified this opportunist “alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie” (Marx) by saying that in relation to the working class, “all other classes are only one reactionary mass”. This ultra-left cliché blurred the difference between the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. It was also reproduced in the Gotha Programme and was angrily rejected by Marx”.

The Critique of the Gotha Program has, in some radical and academic circles, been seen as the Marxist movement finally showing what the future will look like under socialism. At best, this is a miss reading of the book or, worse, a silly deception.

As the Marxist economist Nick Beams points out, “The development of a socialist society will not occur according to a series of prescriptions and rules laid down by an individual, a political party or a governmental authority. Rather, it will develop based on the activity of the members of society who, for the first time in history, consciously regulate and control their social organisation as part of their daily lives, free from the domination and prescriptions of either the “free market” or a bureaucratic authority standing over and above them. In one of his earliest writings, Marx made clear that “only when man has recognised and organised his powers as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished” (Marx, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, Volume 3, p. 168).[1]

While this new translation of a Marxist classic is welcomed, it comes with a health warning. The politics of the organisation that produced it, to put it crudely, stink. The Marxist-Humanist Current was founded in the US by the State Capitalist Raya Dunayevskaya. Along with C L R, James Dunayevskaya, disagreed with Leon Trotsky's definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his time in the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay, formed the Johnson-Forrest tendency that the Soviet Union represented a new form of "state capitalism" with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in his complete and open break with the Fourth International's perspectives: "Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery." [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950]. James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War. Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put the state capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for imperialism within the workers' movement.

The Marxist Humanist Current has nothing to do with Marxism. It does not see the modern working class as revolutionary and has no interest in building a revolutionary party. The Current concentrates not on the working class but on the petty bourgeoisie.

As Peter Linebaugh states in his afterword, “We are at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift”’. His answer to mankind's problems is to rely on a rising among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions that will “become components of ‘the real movement’ that conquers as well as resists: ‘We can pluck the living flower to re-create the commons.’

Ironically, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, while aimed at the Lassalelans of the 19^th century, could also be a scathing critique of their modern-day counterparts in the Marxist Humanist Current.  

 

 

 

 

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[1] Some questions and answers on life under socialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/corr-m30.html

Interview With Guatemalan Writer David Unger

 “Brought up between three cultures and two languages, David Unger has managed to capture with much irony and passion the trials and tribulations of a Jewish family in 1980s Guatemala. The story of three brothers, of the shocks between civilizations that are so in vogue these days, and of the plurality of cultures that coexist in Latin America, Life in the Damn Tropics is a novel that one reads with much perplexity and immense pleasure.”

— Jorge Volpi, author of In Search of Klingsor

"In The Mastermind, David Unger’s compelling antihero reminds us of the effects of privilege and corruption, and how that deadly combo can spill from the public to the private sphere. Unger’s Guillermo Rosensweig is on a hallucinatory journey in which everything seems to go right until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down."

--Achy Obejas, author of Ruins

1 How did the possibility of translating the new book come about?

In 2016, I published my most recent novel, The Mastermind (New York: Akashic Books), which is based rather loosely on real events that caused an existential crisis in Guatemala and almost brought down a left-of-centre government in 2009. It’s a book that has been translated into ten languages. At the time, I felt that I wanted to give back to my birthplace in a unique way. Over the years, I’ve translated 16 books, so it seemed that I should attempt to re-translate Guatemala's Nobel prize in literature author Miguel Angel Asturias’s first and most powerful novel. I contacted the Balcell’s Agency which gave me the green light, but due to some copyright issues, I had to wait until 2022 to publish my translation of Mr. President with Penguin Classics.

2. What do you think of the previous translation by Frances Partridge? What problems were involved after the last translation was over fifty years ago? 

Partridge’s translation is mostly workman-like but suffers, as I say in the introduction, with many Anglicisms and a failure to recognize many Guatemaltequismos—particularly Guatemalan words and terms that she didn’t fully understand. Mr. President is a very American novel, one that lends itself to translation in the American vein. Words like “coppers,” “blimey,” and “lorry” are acceptable terms in the English language but are not inviting to North American readers. Further, she didn’t have a clue about certain Guatemalan foods, birds and plants that have entered into the American vernacular through the immigration of nearly 60 million Latin Americans into the U.S. In some ways, she was hopelessly overmatched though I find that she also came through with some lovely descriptions, a la Bloomsbury style.

3 What kind of research, historical or otherwise, was involved?

Keith, I mostly tried to figure out what Asturias was saying and concentrated fully on the Spanish text. The novel is a depiction of the Estrada Cabrera regime (1898-1920) and mixes high and low language. There are surrealist bursts and many indigenous Guatemalan terms. I worked with two Guatemalan writers/friends who helped me decipher some 250 queries that I had. Both love the work of Asturias and were, indeed, helpful. At times, we were all stumped, and I had to make a leap of faith based on what I thought Asturias was getting at. It is an amazing novel that has a very strong narrative push though there are moments of exquisite descriptions. The Spanish version of Mr. President carries a glossary of about 200 words to help readers, but I wanted to create a version that wouldn’t pull the reader out of the novel to consult with this glossary. This was the main purpose of my translation.

4 Could you explain the importance of Mr. President in Latin American literature?

I am not the only one to say it—Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru’s Nobel Prize novelist) and Gerald Martin (Asturias’s most important scholar and the biographer of Garcia Marquez and soon Vargas Llosa)--, but Mr. President is without question the most important Latin American novel of the 20th century. It introduced surrealism and magical realism into writing and, at the same time, portrayed a dictator who poisons all aspects of society—the social fabric, the legal system, friendship and love—in order to maintain his power. The unnamed president of an unnamed country is only interested in his power, his vanity and his machinations. Does it sound familiar? Let’s mention Trump, Ortega and Bolsonaro. It is a novel that is really a rich tapestry of Latin American life, infused with betrayal, violence and abuse.

5 Given the current situation in Guatemala, would you not agree that the book's release is very prescient?

Definitely, all the reviewers in the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The NY Times, The New York Review of Books express their astonishment about how accurate the novel is in depicting our Latin American reality. Guatemala, in particular, is a dysfunctional country thanks to the “Pacto de corruptos”—the Pact of Corrupt entities—that has a stranglehold on the country. We had primary elections ten days ago, and by surprise, Bernardo Arevalo—the son of what was a brilliant Guatemalan president in the 1940s—made the August 20th runoff. The industrialists, military officers and narco-traffickers are accusing him of being a Communist and that his Semilla Party (Seed Party) wants to destroy capitalism, the Church, marriage, the schools, tortillas, tamales, the volcanoes. Do you get my drift? These megalomaniacs don’t want to give up an ounce of their power. It is disgusting. But I believe that despite these forces of evil, he will succeed. He is a centrist with good values, and, most important, he isn’t corrupt.

6 What are you working on now?

I am at the airport (my flight was delayed) on my way to take part in the Guatemala International Book Fair (FILGUA). There I will present the Spanish version of my children’s book Sleeping With the Lights On (a fictionalized account of the U.S.-directed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954) and discuss Mr. President with Miguel Angel Asturias’s son. I don’t think I have another novel in me—I don’t have anything new to say—but I will continue to write children’s books and translate. I’ve written four novels and, a collection of short stories, 4 children’s books and translated nearly 20 books from Spanish, and I am happy with what I have done.

 

About the Author

Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

BY DAVID UNGER:

Sleeping With the Light On

CHILDRENS, 2020

The Mastermind

NOVEL, 2015

La casita

PICTURE BOOK, 2012

The Price of Escape

NOVEL, 2011

Para mi eres divina

NOVEL, 2011

Ni chicha ni limonada

SHORT STORIES, 2010

Life in the Damn Tropics

NOVEL, 2002