Notting Hill Carnival: An Opiate of the Masses, A Dance of the Oppressed or a Bonfire of Vanities

It is time to reflect as the dust settles on another Notting Hill Carnival. On Tuesday morning, the last of the two million-strong Carnival Occupation Army left for a destination unknown, leaving a trail of destruction that would not look out of place in a war zone.

The orgy of violence and staggering law-breaking is largely ignored by the powers that be. Carnival is glorified in their newspapers. Four of the leading bourgeoisie newspapers, including the Financial Times, had articles that were nothing more than glorified adverts for the Carnival. All had uncritical interviews with the Carnival leader, Matthew Phillips. Phillip is the CEO of the Carnival development agency Carnival Village Trust and Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, which manages the Notting Hill Carnival.

Loud calls have been made to ban the Carnival, It is surely a matter of time before a Hillsborough-type disaster occurs. One came close on Monday when police withdrew people from Portobello Rd after it became dangerously overcrowded. It will be interesting to find out in the coming weeks how many people caught the new strain of COVID-19 that would have been spread by over two million people in close proximity to each other.

But there is not a snowball's chance in hell of it being stopped. Carnival is big business. It generates over £100m in revenue and has cultivated a layer of the black middle class that has done very well out of Carnival. One of its more greedy representatives now sits in jail after stealing nearly three-quarters of a million pounds from the Charity wing of the Carnival.

Happy 2024 Carnival.

 

James M. McPherson. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv + 253 pp., index.

 

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Abraham Lincoln

“The Civil War mobilized human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except, perhaps, World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II.”

James Macpherson

"There is a big idea which is at stake"--Corporal in the 105th Ohio, 1864

“Lincoln's significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”

― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of goodwill, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),

Drawn With the Sword is an excellent work of historical study and contemplation. It is a book of the highest historical standard. It is not one continuous book but a collection of 15 essays on different topics. They examine various subjects ranging from the causes of the war to how the South almost won and why the war still resonates today. Fourteen of the essays were previously published but were revised for this edition. The only new article is “What’s The Matter With History?”

Throughout his career, McPherson has sought to explain complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can understand without dumbing down the history for his more academically minded readers. His essays in the book are a critical reexamination of issues that are still contentious today. For the majority of his career, Professor McPherson has argued that the American Civil War was a revolutionary struggle for equality and democracy and still to this day defends that viewpoint. Macpherson is a  serious historian who has played an objectively significant role in the social life of America and beyond and is the very embodiment of historical memory.

The Marxist writer David Walsh explains how Macpherson has maintained his historical principles. He writes, “How has he retained his principles in the intervening years when so many have not? This is also a complex matter. I think that in any serious figure, historian, artist or political leader, the principle is not simply a matter of certain intellectual formulations that rest on top, so to speak, of one's personality. It is more a matter of the coming together of various powerful social and cultural currents at a critical moment in one's life so that the most positive external influences and what is best in oneself are heated in a crucible, fuse and become one. One can retain principles across time and in the face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks because they are embedded in some part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in the popular mood. One knows with one's entire being certain things to be true, they are not up for debate, much less sale.”[1]

Perhaps the best essay of James M. McPherson's Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War is entitled "Historians and Their Audiences," McPherson poses the question, "What's the matter with history?"

This chapter sums up concisely Macpherson’s historical philosophy. His purpose while writing scholarly books is to appeal to a wider reading audience while maintaining historical standards. This complex problem is not new. The prominent historian Allen Nevins[2] attacked the academics who wrote for themselves, “His touch is death. He destroys the public for historical work by convincing it that history is synonymous with heavy, stolid prosing. Indeed, he is responsible for today a host of intelligent and highly literate Americans who will open a history book only with reluctant dread. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of true history must be most determined and implacable.”

Macpherson addresses this theme of engaging the general public and raising their historical consciousness throughout the book. In the chapter entitled "The Glory Story."  Thomas R Turner relates, “To many people, books are hopelessly irrelevant because far more Americans today get their history from watching movies than reading. However, suppose they receive their notions about African American soldiers and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment from the movie Glory. In that case, he believes they are receiving information from a credible source. He calls the combat footage in Glory the most realistic of any film dealing with the Civil War.”[3]

The legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Reactionary Protesters have objected that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), have a monument erected to Shaw and his regiment. Because it was commanded by a white officer, Shaw, Holland Cotter, the New York Times’s co-chief art critic, slandered the monument and labelled Shaw a “white supremacist”.

One of the more remarkable essays is “The War That Never Goes Away.” Macpherson correctly believes that the war, right or wrong has an “enduring fascination” with the American and world public.McPherson points to what he holds to be the reason for this fascination is that “Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die; issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States but at the same time are still alive and contested today.”

Macpherson’s defence of Abraham Lincoln in the book is laudable. McPherson argues convincingly that Lincoln was the key figure in the struggle against slavery. Macpherson’s stance on Lincoln has come under sustained attack. One hundred fifty-five years after the first assassination, Lincoln is facing a second. Race-fixated protesters like Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, have moved to introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from Lincoln Park in Washington, DC.

As David North writes, “Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[4]

In the chapter "Why Did the Confederacy Lose?" he examines the political and economic reasons behind the South’s devastating defeat. He writes, “Altogether nearly 4 per cent of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died due to the war. This percentage exceeded the human cost of any country in World War I and was outstripped only by the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate States is almost incalculable. It has been estimated at two-thirds of all assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.”[5]

As David Walsh points out, “To establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he (Macpherson) has been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively based on economic statistics that the conception of Louis Gerteis and others that the Civil War and Reconstruction produced “no fundamental changes” in the forms of economic and social organization in the South is wrong. In the same work, he also counters the arguments of historians such as James G. Randall and T. Harry Williams, who have asserted that Lincoln was essentially a political conservative and an enemy of social revolution.”[6]

Perhaps James Macpherson’s most important struggle has been to defend his historical principles against the method that looks at history through the prism of race. Macpherson opposes the “fashionable practice of condemning all whites as racists.”

To his eternal credit, Macpherson collaborated with the World Socialist Website(WSWS.ORG) attack on the falsification of history by the New York Times 1619 Project. In an interview with Macpherson, The WSWS asked him about his initial reaction to the 1619 Project.

He answered Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in, I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly not an exclusively American institution but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account emphasized American racism—a major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out.”

According to David North and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times 1619 Project was a politically-motivated falsification of history and presented the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict. They make this point in their book: “Despite the pretence of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on prioritizing personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”[7]

There is much to admire in the work of this outstanding Civil War historian. Macpherson writes engagingly and explains complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can take in, encouraging his readers to see history in a new light.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcin-m18.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Nevins

[3] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson

Thomas R Turner Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 1997, pp. 47-54

[4] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[5] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War

By James M. McPherson

[6] An exchange with a Civil War historian- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcp2-m19.html

[7] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html

In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful: A Novel-David Unger- Mosaic Press- 31/07/2023

 

“David Unger has created an unforgettable female protagonist. Olivia is shy but strong: unattractive but sensual; she feels guilty but angry at her family for abandoning her. She wants to love and be loved, made of flesh and blood; we identify with her through the author’s natural, fluid prose, which also has some startling images.”

- Monica Lavin, El Universal, Mexico City

David Unger’s latest book in English is a beautifully and intelligently crafted coming-of-age novel about an Indigenous Guatemalan woman. After three previous publications in Spanish as Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2012, Editorial Cultura, Guatemala, 2014, & Storytel audio, 2018, In My Eyes You Are Beautiful is finally published in English.

In a recent interview with the author, I asked him why it has taken so long he replied. “ Para mi, eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent couldn’t sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man. Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C. issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, it can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has personal and universal appeal.”

David Unger is one of the most widely published and well-known authors of fiction, short stories, articles, translations, and children’s books in Spanish and English. In 2014 he was honoured with Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’ National Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is one of the few internationally recognised authors who critically examines the huge social inequality in his home country, Guatemala. His clarity of thought regarding the problems facing the Guatemalan indigenous and working-class people is second to none. His hostility to the Guatemalan ruling elites and their Yankee capitalist backers is admirably portrayed in his novels. He “explores the tensions, character and texture of Central America as few other writers have done.”

The last few years have been a busy time for Unger. Just recently, Penguin published a new and splendid English translation of the dictator novel “El Señor Presidente” —“Mr President” with an introduction by Gerald Martin. The new translation has been met with much praise.

In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful is a coming-of-age novel that narrates the life of a young indigenous woman. I asked David Unger if the main character was real or based on someone he knew. He says, “Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists from a privileged class. In this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticised or mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s, the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and crops meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because of that, she can transform her life from one of servitude to one of independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like figure.”

Like most of Unger’s work, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful takes place during a particular historical moment in Guatemala. It starts in 1970 and ends in 1990 while Olivia Padilla Xuc is still a young woman, which begs whether Unger is planning a sequel. The twenty-year period covered by the novel is one of Guatemala’s most brutal. The genocide carried out by the Guatemalan ruling elite and its army is well documented.

Guatemalan history has been dominated by the so-called “bonds” between Guatemala and Washington. Dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American capitalism, with help from its junior Guatemalan partners, carried out the brutal exploitation and bloody oppression of Guatemala’s population of workers, peasants and indigenous peoples. The First Banana Republic.  The country’s economy was run by the  United Fruit Company and other U.S. banks and corporations, whose interests were defended by military dictatorships that regularly massacred and executed workers who dared to strike or protest.

The bloody period covered by Unger’s book is a by-product of the 1954 Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) led coup that overthrew the democratically elected president. Jacobo Árbenz, who was not a communist, initiated a limited land reform that included the appropriation, with compensation, of lands controlled but unused, by United Fruit.

The coup led to three decades of unparalleled brutality and murder on an industrial scale. The war claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 people, most of them indigenous peasants wiped out in a genocidal campaign by a military that was trained and armed to the teeth by America.

According to Andrea Lobo, “ In a confidential memo drafted in the wake of the coup against Árbenz, the U.S. National Security Council stated that Washington’s aim in the region was to compel Latin American countries “to base their economies on a system of private enterprise, and, as essential to that, to create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment of both domestic and foreign capital.”[1]

If Unger does a sequel to this book, it will cover important political events from 1990 onwards. On December 4, 1996, a peace accord was signed. A top Guatemalan general and other government members joined guerrilla leaders in signing a “definite ceasefire” in Oslo, Norway. “With this agreement, the weapons will be silenced forever,” said Rolando Moran, a Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union commander, a coalition of three guerrilla movements.

“The “truth commission,” established as part of the peace process to investigate past human rights violations, was denounced by human rights activists as a travesty. The commission’s final report would not name any individuals who violated human rights, and its findings could not be used to bring anyone to trial. The commission had only six months to investigate the decades-long war. The agreement left Guatemala’s social structure, the fundamental cause of the bloodshed, untouched. Most of the population comprised poor peasants living in rural villages and labouring in highly exploitative agricultural labour. At the same time, a tiny elite of wealthy families ruled in Guatemala City and maintained its monopoly of the country’s economic and political life.”[2]

Whatever David Unger does next, his book is a significant landmark in the study of the lives of ordinary indigenous and working-class Guatemalans. His opposition to the Guatemalan and Yankee elites is to be commended. I wish him every success in his next adventure. It remains to be seen if Unger has another book in him. If not, I want to wish him a long-due retirement.

 

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[1] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, The American Republics, Volume IV - Office of the Historian

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/28/twih-n28.html

Interview with Guatemalan Writer David Unger

David Unger kindly interrupted his holiday to answer these questions. David’s splendid new book In My Eyes You Are Beautiful has just been published in English. It is available on Amazon.

Q. Given that there is no translator’s name on the book, I assume you translated this book into English. Did you incur any problems? Secondly, why did it take so long to appear in English?

A. Actually, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful—like all my novels—was written in English. I left Guatemala when I was four, though I spent eight summers there living with my grandparents in downtown Guatemala City. Para mi, eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent wasn’t able to sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man. Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C. issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, perhaps it can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has both personal and universal appeal.

Q. As both a writer and translator, may I ask your opinion on the use of A.I.?

A. Oh my, Keith, that’s quite a question! Personally, I don’t think A.I. can capture the subtleties or nuances that transform good writing into great writing. I can’t see A.I. composing:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.

Coral is far more red than her lips red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

As for translation, again, I would say that the poetry and the humour would be lost. Last year, Penguin Classics published my re-translation of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr President, which is now in its 4th edition. I can’t imagine A.I. capturing the richness of this fantastic novel completed nearly 100 years ago!

Q. You have an extraordinary gift of combining Fiction with historical events. There seems to be a tradition among Latin American writers. Could you tell me your early influences?

A. That’s kind of you to say, Keith. All my novels have taken place during a particular historical moment in Guatemala, whether it be during the 1930s when a Fascist president sold the soul of the country to the United Fruit Company or during the armed conflict in Guatemala from the 70s to the 90’s. I can’t imagine writing a novel without a strong political backdrop. I think of The Mastermind, which has been translated into ten languages, as primarily a love story, but it is also a kind of cautionary tale which reveals that love, friendship and community are impossible when the political and economic system is corrupt and corrupted. My teachers were Rulfo and Vargas Llosa, but also Steinbeck, Austen and Joyce.

Q. As I said before, the book marries fictional characters with historical events. How much research do you have to do to make sure your work is historically accurate?

A. I did a lot of reading on history and economics in preparing to write The Price of Escape. I wanted the novel to be a personal story of an indecisive Jewish man arriving in the port city of Puerto Barrios, but again with the backdrop of the United Fruit Company and its monomaniacal stranglehold on Guatemala during the 1930s. The novel is a kind of “what if” story about my father, but with quite a lot of fabrication and transformation. My other novels grew out of what I already knew about my birth country—it was more of a question of figuring out how to tell the stories that I wanted to tell.

Q. Your characters in the book are extremely real and alive. Are they completely made up, or are they an amalgam of real people?

Q. Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists who were from a privileged class, and in this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticized or mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s, the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and their crops meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because of that, she is able to transform her life from one of servitude to one of independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like figure.

Q. I saw on Facebook that you took the marvellous step of taking the book to schools in Guatemala. Could you briefly tell me the response of the children?

A. I participated in Guatemala’s FILGUA—its international book fair last month. F y G Editores published the Spanish version of Sleeping With the Lights On, and the publisher, Raul Figueroa, arranged for me to visit a public elementary school nearby. The school had no library, and the fifth and sixth graders had never seen a writer. They were thrilled to meet me, but to be honest, I received so much more from them: I was so grateful for their curiosity, enthusiasm and comments about my little chapter book.

Q. What has been the media response to the book? Has the right-wing press in Guatemala attacked the book?

A. The novel was first published in Mexico by a PRH imprint in 2011 and then published in Guatemala in 2014 to coincide with my receiving Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’s Literature Prize for lifetime achievement. The novel has been out of print now for about three years, and Denise Phe-Funchal, who translated Sleeping With the Lights On, is preparing a new translation. On several occasions, indigenous Guatemalan women came up to me and thanked me for telling “their story.” Well, it’s really just one story, but something touched them and that meant the world to me. I don’t expect the same reaction to the English edition, but I do hope that the book gets some coverage. Quien sabe? Maybe a good handful of readers will find that the novel touched them deeply.

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.

 

A historian’s day: 10th August,2023-Christopher Thompson

My day has a pretty fixed routine. When I get up, I normally check my incoming e-mail and then go on to look at my google alerts to see what has been post online since the preceding day. There are some blogs dealing with early modern history that I normally look at as well.

In recent years, I have developed a database covering the local history societies in my native county and letting the officers of those societies have information about the activities  - lectures, meetings and trips - being organised elsewhere. Most but not all such local history societies have websites but some do not give full details of their events or their locations. I have been surprised to discover that a few people do not wish to receive such information and ask to be struck off  my list of contacts. One such request reached me this morning from the son of one of the officers of a nearby society to which I have spoken in the past: no reason was given. More cheerfully, I met the chairman of my own village history society in the local chemist’s premises this morning.

I was pleased too to see on Sandy Solomon’s Facebook page a picture of two of my friends, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, on a visit to Canons Ashby, a house built by Erasmus Dryden, in Northamptonshire. I first met them both in the former Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London in about 1980. Peter had by then completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge and taken a lecturing post at Bedford College, in the University of London. Richard, to the best of my recollection, was engaged in his research into the Forced Loan of 1626-1628. They were both highly interesting to talk to and engaging companions in the tea/coffee room of the P.R.O. I should add that the tea or coffee on sale there was pretty horrible. Ann Hughes was also about at that time.

The rest of my morning was spent looking for a piece by Penelope Corfield that I saw a couple of days ago but can no longer find. I remember her from the time when she beat me to a lecturing job at what was then Bedford College in the University of London.

I was more successful in reading a piece by Lorina P. Repina, a Russian historian, on the academic.edu site. She is based in the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences and considered the ‘Writing practices in the space of intercultural interaction’. I am sorry to say that I did not find it particularly enlightening but, in general terms, I am interested in the historiographical products of eastern European countries, especially when they touch upon the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

It is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of historians working there or their ingenuity in re-working the conclusions of scholars able to access the major documentary repositories here or in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and Spain. Partly because of an apparent lack of personal contact with historians in these countries or in North America, there seems in some cases to be a time lag with a consequent reliance on figures like Tawney, Hill, Stone and others as if their works still commanded the fields they were interested in. One can find historians in south America - in Brazil, for example, where Christopher Hill enjoys a kind of cult following - who share their concerns but who are much better acquainted with more recent studies. I am not sure what can be done about this situation but it does make reading the works of eastern European historians challenging, interesting and often puzzling. 

How the “friends” of Royal Mail workers helped the CWU inflict defeat – Part 1 & 2

wsws.org

How did Ward, Furey and the CWU Postal Executive get away with imposing their hated pro-company agreement against Royal Mail workers? This question cannot be answered outside of the role played by "pseudo-left" groups who posed as workers friends, but who protected the bureaucracy from a rank-and-file rebellion. This is an an Important article.

One month has passed since the Communication Workers Union (CWU) led by Dave Ward and Andy Furey succeeded in pushing through their pro-company “Business Recovery, Growth and Transformation Agreement” in a ballot whose results were announced July 11.

The impact of the CWU’s agreement is already being felt by tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers: punitive new attendance procedures and reduced sick pay; the shuttering of parcel collection offices; cuts to indoor sorting time forcing delivery workers to pound the streets for longer with impossible workloads; unknown numbers earmarked for redeployment and redundancy as automated super hubs come into operation.

Ward and Furey are despised figures among militant postal workers. Thousands have resigned from the union, while discussions are underway at delivery offices and mail centres on the lessons of the year-long dispute.

The struggle at Royal Mail has exposed the unbridgeable gulf between the privileged bureaucracy serving as an arm of corporate management, and the membership.

Rank-and-file opposition erupted —just four months into the dispute—after the CWU’s cancellation of strikes following legal threats from the company. Workers began denouncing Ward and Furey, demanding action to defeat the company’s aggressive “revisions” to terms and conditions. But the CWU stared this down, entering talks at conciliation service ACAS and allowing the company to impose its workplace agenda through bullying and coercion.

From October through March, the World Socialist Web Site’s coverage of the dispute won a growing audience among Royal Mail workers. Its exposure of the CWU’s pro-company agenda chimed with the sentiments of thousands of workers who were determined to fight.

This led to the formation of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) on April 2, 2023. The committee advocated a path of independent struggle against the CWU bureaucracy. Affiliated to the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), it forged links with postal workers in Belgium, Germany, Australia and the United States. The committee’s statements circulated widely at Royal Mail, especially after the CWU’s pro-company agreement was published in April.

Between April and June, the CWU bureaucracy was plunged into crisis, terrified that workers’ anger would coalesce into organised mass resistance, breaking its stranglehold over the dispute.

The rank-and-file committee won a sympathetic hearing among postal workers, but Ward and Furey maintained control and were able to ram through the company’s attacks. Their ability to do so was made possible by Britain’s pseudo-left organisations. Groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Workers Power intervened throughout the dispute to promote illusions that the CWU bureaucracy could be pressured to fight for workers’ interests, concealing its fundamental role as an arm of corporate management and the state.

These groups, representing sections of the upper middle class including those with lucrative positions in the apparatus of the trade unions, formed the “left” flank of efforts by the Stalinist Morning Star, the pro-Corbyn Canary and newly formed campaign group Enough is Enough to protect the labour and trade union bureaucracy from a rank-and-file insurgency, block the fight for socialism and channel workers behind a future Labour government.

Dave Ward’s political backers

In April, Ward addressed an online meeting of CWU reps, attacking “extreme political groups who sometimes look to infiltrate trade unions” and who have “no interest in you and the future of this company”. Acknowledging widespread opposition to the CWU’s pro-company agreement, he declared, “What I don’t accept is that they [political groups] should over-influence our members in this particular dispute.”

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with Dave Ward (right), General Secretary of the CWU, August 1, 2016. [Photo by Anthony Devlin, PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo]

Ward’s attack was a pathetic attempt to whip-up prejudices against socialism and Marxism while he and the CWU sought to “over-influence” workers on behalf of Royal Mail shareholders. In his 1998 essay, “Why are trade unions hostile to socialism?”, David North reviewed the historical development of trade unions from the mid-19th century, showing their universal tendency to suppress the class struggle, which finds its most conscious expression in the union bureaucracy’s hostility to socialism: “Standing on the basis of capitalist production relations, the trade unions are, by their very nature, compelled to adopt a hostile attitude toward the class struggle. Directing their efforts toward securing agreements with employers that fix the price of labor-power and determine the general conditions in which surplus-value will be pumped out of the workers, the trade unions are obligated to guarantee that their members supply their labor-power in accordance with the terms of the negotiated contracts. As Gramsci noted, ‘The union represents legality, and must aim to make its members respect that legality.’ The defense of legality means the suppression of the class struggle.”

While Ward and the bureaucracy repeatedly attacked the WSWS, they promoted the Labour Party and its right-wing politics. Labour MP Darren Jones was invited by the CWU to its national briefing of reps on April 21, presented as the saviour of postal workers and given a standing ovation. Jones publicly supported the CWU’s surrender document.

The Socialist Workers Party are expert at providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, while serving to politically block any independent movement of the working class.

The SWP’s long-established theory of the trade unions is one that justifies the bureaucracy’s domination over the working class. According to the SWP, “the bureaucracy play a contradictory role within capitalism. On the one hand, their role is to fight for the interests of workers. On the other, their function is to resolve the tensions between workers and bosses… But it is more complex than simply saying that trade union leaders’ role and experience mean that they will always mechanically sell out”. This is because, “Even only at the level of the bureaucracy, there is a range of different pressures interacting and shaping the development of any dispute… The combination of these pressures in particular moments in a dispute can tip the balance in one direction. The dynamic is not black and white.”

The “dynamic” being described is that of the SWP’s slavish defence of the bureaucracy. This was on full display at Royal Mail. While the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS called for the formation of rank-and-file committees to draw up strike demands and seize control of the dispute from the CWU bureaucracy, the SWP disarmed postal workers in the face of an impending betrayal. Less than three weeks before the CWU unveiled its pro-company agreement, it posted an article, “CWU union leaders could call new Royal Mail strikes,” urging them to launch “hard hitting action to bring Thompson and the board to their knees.”

Socialist Worker March 24 article, "CWU union leaders could call new Royal Mail strikes" [Photo: screenshot: socialist worker]

The CWU bureaucracy were then deep in talks with Royal Mail at ACAS, facilitated by former Trades Union Congress president Sir Brendan Barber, aimed at retaining their long-standing partnership with the company. Its only disagreement with workplace revisions was that they were being implemented unilaterally, instead of via agreement with CWU national officials.

After the negotiators’ agreement was published, the SWP adapted to workers’ angry denunciations of Ward and Furey. An April 21 article, “It will take organisation to stop this deal”, presented the fight entirely in organisational terms, urging only that “Workers should vote to reject the deal when it is put to a ballot—and demand more, harder-hitting strikes immediately.” But who was going to organise such strikes? The SWP’s suggestion that a “No” vote would pressure the bureaucracy to escalate the struggle was pure fantasy. Most workers who later voted for the agreement did so because they recognised a “no” vote by itself would not defeat the surrender document under conditions where the CWU executive was already implementing the company’s savage assault.

Spooked by the prominence of the WSWS and the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee, the SWP rushed to promote a series of bogus “rank-and-file” initiatives, including Postal Workers Say Vote No, NHS Workers Say Vote No and Strike Map. These united the SWP with sections of the trade union bureaucracy, Corbynites and other pseudo-left groups such as Counterfire and Workers Power to direct rank-and-file opposition back behind the bureaucracy.

On April 25, the Socialist Worker reported one such event, “Build the strikes, link the fights, reject bad deals”. It cited a key participant from the National Education Union (NEU) who explained the group’s purpose was to “push trade union leaders to move forward”. The SWP urged support for a model resolution by Strike Map’s steering group (aligned politically to Corbyn) calling on the “leading bodies” of the NEU, Royal College of Nursing, and British Medical Association to “coordinate future strike dates” and “force action from the government”. The unions’ “leading bodies” took no notice of such appeals. Both the NEU and RCN cancelled industrial action to ram through below-inflation pay deals negotiated with the Sunak government.

Workers Power

Workers Power, a splinter group from the SWP buried in the Labour Party, played a critical role for the CWU bureaucracy in heading off a genuine rank-and-file rebellion.

On April 21, Workers Power member Andy Young, a CWU rep from Leeds sacked during the dispute, wrote to the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) asking to join. He was invited to attend its Zoom meeting on April 23, where he opposed the committee’s formation, claiming it was “premature”. He then voted to abstain on the committee’s resolution adopted by postal workers in attendance, “Organise to defeat CWU-Royal Mail agreement: Vote NO! Reinstate all victimised workers! Build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee!”

The next day, Young set up “Postal Workers Say Vote No”, a Facebook group which attracted hundreds of postal workers based on its purported opposition to the CWU’s surrender document.

On May 3, Young wrote again to the PWRFC, asking it to support the “no” campaign initiated by Workers Power, including financial help to distribute a “model motion” drafted for CWU branches. The model motion typified the two-faced character of Young’s group. It began with the claim that, “The Business, Recovery, Growth and Transformation Agreement has blocked a few of the worst policies Royal Mail tried to impose on workers and our union, but it has conceded on others and is a big step back in terms of pay, terms and conditions, and guarantees.”

The PWRFC replied to Young:

“Your opposition to the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee reflects your defence of the bureaucracy. That is why you refused to endorse the committee’s resolution. You cited at our meeting the 2007 ‘vote no’ initiative by you and other activists as a model for the ‘open campaign’ you are proposing—based on its endorsement by a lone member of CWU’s postal executive which supposedly ‘allowed us to launch it on a much larger scale’. This is a rebellion on one’s knees. It ended in defeat and blocked a genuine fight by postal workers.

“Your real aim is an alliance with a faction of the bureaucracy against the workers. At our meeting, you stated that a ‘no’ campaign must be based on a ‘united front’ with workers, reps and CWU ‘officials that want to reject the deal, as long as they put no conditions on that’. But where are these phantom officials? You have invented an opposition from CWU officials so that you can rule out a struggle against this bureaucracy.

“The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee is open to all workers who want to defeat the CWU’s sell-out deal. We will not allow the committee’s freedom of action to be compromised by the types of alliances and backroom manoeuvres that typify the efforts of your Workers Power group, the SWP and similar outfits that function as ‘left’ advisors to the trade union bureaucracy.”

Statement by Postal Workers Say No, July 27, 2023. [Photo: Screenshot]

Workers Power used the Postal Workers Say Vote No group to promote fruitless appeals to the CWU national officials and reps who were busy enforcing Royal Mail’s dictates. After the CWU pushed through its sellout deal, the group announced a name change to Postal Workers Say No (PWSN), explaining their aims as follows: “We are not a genuine rank and file network much less movement yet, but aim to build for one”.

This “aim” cannot even be regarded as aspirational. PWSN’s July 27 statement outlined the group’s support for the bureaucracy in unmistakeable terms: “We will support all positive efforts by the union leaders eg [sic] organising drives to rebuild membership, but oppose them whenever they fail to defend workers interests or move against them.”

It stated that PWSN would also, “Expose backsliding from the deal” [!] adding, “We can critically support opposition candidates that gain members’ support by promising a more fighting policy (even if they called for a yes vote).”

Conclusion

The 2022-23 Royal Mail dispute was part of a developing wave of class struggle across the UK and worldwide driven by the deepest cost-of-living crisis in decades. Workers set out to defeat savage demands for corporate restructuring by shareholders and investors dictated by the capitalist market. All over the world, the working class is coming into head-on conflict with the bureaucracy of the trade unions, which have transformed over the past four decades from defensive organisations of the working class into arms of corporate management and the state.

The growth of corporatism in the trade unions was analysed by Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the Russian Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, more than 80 years ago. He wrote: “There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.” He explained, “Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of the trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class.”

Corporatism has since become fully entrenched in the trade unions of all countries; a process accelerated over the past four decades by the globalisation of capitalist production. Digital communications technology has enabled the capitalist class to scour the globe, locate production wherever labour costs are lowest and integrate the production process across national borders. The nationally based trade union and labour bureaucracies, defending capitalism as the source of their privileges, have responded by repudiating their old reformist programs, insisting that workers must accept the destruction of their wages, conditions and living standards so that the corporations can be “globally competitive.” Hence the CWU’s demand that postal workers “sacrifice” to save Royal Mail from bankruptcy, i.e., protect shareholder profit. No matter how much workers give up today, it will never be enough, as “the market” demands an increased return on investment each year. Failure to deliver is punished in the form of credit downgrades and the withdrawal of funds as billionaires like Daniel Kretinsky move vulture-like to find new sources of profit.

These facts of modern-day capitalism dictate the political tasks before the working class, showing the necessity for an international socialist strategy. The overthrow of the capitalist oligarchy and the reorganisation of global economy to meet human need not private profit is posed as an urgent task.

The determined, year-long battle at Royal Mail has provided an object lesson in the pro-capitalist politics of the pseudo-left. The SWP, SP and Workers Power emerged historically from petty-bourgeois tendencies which broke from Trotskyism and the Fourth International in the post-World War II period. Adapting themselves to the temporary stabilisation of capitalism, they rejected the struggle to build an international revolutionary party of the working class. All that could be accomplished, they insisted, was to place pressure in the existing Stalinist and reformist leaderships to fight for reforms, through strikes and other forms of protest.

The restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union, the abandonment of reformism by the Labour Party and their naked embrace of capitalism, and the corporatist degeneration of the trade unions has blown this perspective apart. It has seen the pseudo-left tendencies lurch ever further to the right in their role as the last line of defence for the bureaucracy.

The PWRFC and the IWA-RFC provides the vehicle for organizing the struggles of the working class and the political strategy this demands:

1)    Complete independence from the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party. Not the futile perspective of stiffening the spine of Ward and company, but the building of an insurgent movement of the rank-and-file to break their stranglehold and drive them from office.

2)    For an international struggle by the working class against the common enemy. Instead of a fratricidal contest over who will sacrifice most in the interest of the corporations and shareholders, unity with all workers throughout the UK and internationally who are fighting in defence of their jobs, wages and conditions.

To take this fight forward means building a new socialist leadership in the working class. This is the most important lesson from the struggle at Royal Mail.

 Labour MP Darren Jones congratulating the CWU on Twitter over its rotten pro-company deal [Photo: screenshot: Darren Jones/Twitter]

Royal Mail workers confronted a political struggle from the start against a Tory government rushing through essential services legislation to break the strike and a Labour opposition whose leader Sir Keir Starmer threatened to sack any shadow cabinet MP who visited a picket line. Their vicious response to the strike was part of efforts to suppress a growing strike wave they feared could bring down the government, jeopardising NATO’s proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia. In October, with Truss’s premiership in meltdown, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was summoned to the White House for urgent discussions that were later described as “beyond belief”.

If thousands of Royal Mail workers were blindsided by Ward’s betrayal of the strike, this was above all the responsibility of the Socialist Party, SWP and similar petty-bourgeois groups which built him up for years as a “left”. After Ward became general secretary in 2015, defeating incumbent Billy Hayes, the SP urged delegates to the CWU’s conference to “let Ward know they expect him to deliver on the more assertive stance that his election campaign indicated.” Despite Ward having worked with Hayes to ensure smooth passage of Royal Mail’s privatisation in 2013, the SP wrote, “Socialists in the union should demand that Dave Ward campaigns on the union’s progressive policies and gives members and reps the confidence to stand up to management.”

The backing of Ward by Britain’s pseudo-left was consolidated through their joint support for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who spent his five years in power suppressing the class struggle and capitulating to the Blairites on every front.

In 2016, SWP National Secretary Charlie Kimber interviewed Ward in Socialist Worker under the headline, “CWU leader Dave Ward says, ‘We need a strategy to beat the Tories’”. Kimber gushed, “Like us, you’ve been enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn’s election”. Ward responded by saying Labour had to be “prepared to say it will shift wealth to workers.” But he cautioned, “we have to be patient. If Corbyn is elected saying he will renationalise three industries and he manages one, that’s still an improvement, still a success.” Kimber then politely alluded to “the difficulties Corbyn is facing over an issue like Trident,” i.e., the Parliamentary Labour Party’s insistence that Trident nuclear weapons would remain Labour policy. Ward replied, “I think saying we’re all against nuclear weapons is the wrong starting point.” Ward’s de facto endorsement of nuclear weapons passed without comment by the SWP. Corbyn retained support for Trident—alongside NATO—in Labour’s election manifesto.

Socialist Party

Aside from the Morning Star, published by the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, the most naked defender of Ward and Furey during the dispute was the Socialist Party. With thousands of postal workers denouncing the CWU’s surrender document, the SP was plunged into crisis. It was a full five days before the SP could bring itself to comment on one of the most savage betrayals by the union bureaucracy in recent history.

On April 26, a statement by “Socialist Party members in the CWU” appeared in The Socialist. It claimed the negotiators’ agreement had “forced Royal Mail back on a number of issues”, before noting regretfully that this was “not enough” and calling for a “no” vote by members. The SP claimed the agreement was the outcome of “anti-trade union management, hell-bent on smashing our union”. This was a political cover for the CWU national executive, which co-authored the agreement with Royal Mail’s board. The SP portrayed the bureaucracy’s actions as a “mistake” which could be rectified through friendly advice: “The CWU leadership was unprepared for the type of battle this has turned into… The union’s leadership should have prepared, through discussion at all levels of the union, for escalating action.”

While the CWU executive was being denounced by workers as company stooges, the SP was calling on the executive to fight for Royal Mail’s renationalisation, “particularly when CEO Simon Thompson and co threatened administration.” But it was Ward and Furey threatening financial “Armageddon” against CWU members if they failed to endorse the union-company agreement. The SP’s absurd appeals served definite political ends, subordinating the working class to the Labour Party and to the Sunak government. It even suggested that both Starmer and the Tories could be pressured to oppose Royal Mail’s attacks: “The CWU leadership should have demanded that Keir Starmer publicly commit to the policy passed at last autumn’s Labour Party conference, of taking Royal Mail back into public ownership. That could have put real pressure on Sunak’s Tory government who have backed Royal Mail bosses.”

 

Diary of a Nobody

The blog reached a significant milestone last month, registering over 8000-page hits. The previous six months have seen a general rise in interest in the blog And the website. The end of the year should see the overall total of hits during the lifetime of the blog reach around half a million.

Projects Old and New

Although I will continue to write articles for the blog/website, during my holiday, I will be looking at reworking previous unfinished projects. The first update is a master's dissertation, Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates 1647. Secondly, work to complete the Raphael Samuel Book. Thirdly a new edition of my Why I Write a book with increased contributors. Lastly, to start research for a short biography of the historian Christopher Hill. All these books/projects will be self-published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing because no self-respecting publisher has ever published anything by an orthodox Marxist.

New Books

The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1-3 Hardcover

Maimonides: Faith in Reason (Jewish Lives) Hardcover – 6 May 2023 Manguel  Alberto

Osip Mandelstam a new biography-Ralph Dutii

Island Brigaders Liam Turbett

The Invention of Marxism-C Morina

The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920-A Nowak

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

New Articles

The next article for my website will be a review of the book Indomitable Revolutionary: Duncan Hallas, A Tribute By Dave Sherry, Jack Robertson, Sheila McGregor, Laura Miles, Alex Callinicos, John Rudge   Price: £12.00

A polemic commenting on the BBC Magazine article on Is History History. ( See- American Historical Association president issues grovelling apology after racialist social media attack-Tom Mackaman) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/24/ogzj-a24.html

  Other Media

An interview with economic historian Stephen Wheatcroft on the Soviet famine and historical falsification- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/10/qutp-j10.html

New Left Review July-August-Eric Hobsbawm Society New and Old