Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20

 

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

— Oscar Wilde From the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray

 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”

“ Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Proverbs 26:4-5

This is a very bad book. It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20^th Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six letters written by Eileen O'Shaughnessy to a friend.

While stating Orwell was her “hero," Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the Patriarchy, " which she does not define or offer any objective or scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships among humans.

If this was not bad enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles[1] that labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their ideas and used them to write books.

Despite the tedious and confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history. O'Shaughnessy was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated. Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O'Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in 1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs would follow.”[2]

Funder has an unhealthy interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O'Shaughnessy, much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,[3] to prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O'Shaughnessy from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.

As Rebecca Solnit points out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923, had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”[4]

It seems clear that Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.

One of the more outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984, from Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in this case, two of the greatest books of the 20^th Century. If anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.

In other words, it has been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Orwell saw further than O'Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin

One of the more disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine's College, Oxford, is the only brave soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve. Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through the life and work of George Orwell).[5]

Another disturbing aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies, she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[6]

Reading this book left a bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder's main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews of a very bad book.

  

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[1] See-The biography that destroys George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator www.tellerreport.com/life

[2] Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review

[3] A Partnership of Lies- www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm

[4] George Orwell in an age of moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s standards?

 

[5] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/

[6] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution

April 11 2002

David North-Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.Mehring Books -2023

 I firmly believe that Leon Trotsky remains a colossal figure in the history of revolutionary socialism in the twentieth century. It beholds anyone interested in this revolutionary giant to carefully study this collection of writings on the great man by David North.

North believes Trotsky’s greatest achievement was founding the Fourth International (FI) in 1938 after the Third International under Stalin facilitated the coming to power of Hitler in Germany without a fight by the multi-millioned working class.

Trotsky opposed Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” he wrote in the founding document of the FI that “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

North’s book covers forty years of revolutionary struggles. This collection of essays is designed to remind the older reader of Trotsky’s rich heritage and “bring the rich historical lessons to a new generation of workers and young people, to resolve the “historical crisis of mankind.”

My favourite essay is Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, published in 1982. It was written during the months when the sick Stalinist leader Leonid Brezhnev passed power to Yuri Andropov, who died. Power was then transferred to  Konstantin Chernenko—who, within two years, joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March 1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reading that essay was one of the reasons for my joining the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1983. It had a profound effect on my political development. The essay is written as a tribute to Tom Henehan, who was assassinated on October 16, 1977. The four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.

The essay "Trotsky's Last Year" is extraordinarily good. Trotsky was at the height of his powers before a Stalinist Agent murdered him. It contains an appreciation of one of my favourite essays, “Trotsky’s Place in History,” by C.L.R. James, the Caribbean socialist intellectual and historian, who wrote:

“During his last decade he [Trotsky] was an exile, apparently powerless. During those same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power like no man in Europe since Napoleon wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful president who has ever ruled in America, and America is the most powerful nation in the world. Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’s judgment of Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died was the greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.”

Workers and youth should carefully study this book to prepare for future struggles. It is a vital guide and provides the strategy and tactics necessary for a successful fight against capitalism.

 

 

 

Comment: Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present-James H. Sweet | August 17, 2022

The historian David Motadel recently wrote an article for the BBC History Magazine called Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present? His article somewhat tamely examined one of the fiercest and one-sided debates to explode last year.

The historical controversy arose over an essay entitled ‘Is History History? Written by James H Sweet, then president of the influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that organisation’s magazine in August 2022. Sweet’s article was intended to open up a discussion on the relationship between the present and the past. This is an important and complicated subject. It raises questions about both methods—the way sources are used and interpreted—and philosophy. Sweet raised legitimate concerns and should not have offered an apology or retraction when he was heavily critiqued.

Sweet said little new in the article that had not been written about over the last two decades. He noted that looking at history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” has diminished “the values and mores of people in their times”.

Historian Lynn Hunt made similar points as Sweet in 2002,[1] with little fuss being made about it. But today, Sweet’s article caused a “global social media backlash”. It was branded  “crap”, and he had a “smug condescension”. He was even called a “white supremacist,” and as a “white man,” he had no right to comment on black or African history. The New York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The Washington Post called it “academia’s most recent pratfall”. The AHA was forced to take its Twitter account private.

Instead of challenging this witchhunt, Sweet issued a grovelling apology, saying, “My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association. A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.”[2]

However, as the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “Sweet did not explain what it was, concretely, that had caused all the “damage” and “harm” he now confesses to have inflicted. If he were to explain, he would have to admit that his column hurt no one, that there was nothing offensive about it. Instead, he would have to say that his column violated the unspoken rules of censorship that hold sway over academia and circumscribe American intellectual life. Having stepped out of line—the president of the AHA, no less!—Sweet needed to be brought to heel, and it was no less essential that he flog himself before his censors. The problem for Sweet is that the embrace of identity politics, which is a religion of the phoney “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party (and also the main route to funding and career opportunities for many academics), must be totally—observed in public statements as well as private thought. He will remain suspect![3]

What was Sweet’s first sin? He made the cardinal error of attacking the current fixation with Presentism. As was said above, Sweet’s attack on Presentism was principled but not new. All Sweet did was repeat Hunt’s warning and attack “short-termism and identity politics defined by present concerns,” He asked, “Wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead? History suffuses everyday life in many places as Presentism; America is no exception. We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as a method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for articulating competing politics. The consequences of this new history are everywhere.”

His second sin was to critique the New York Times 1619 project, albeit very mildly. He wrote, “When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.

Then, the Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the Times, developed a secondary school curriculum around the project. Local school boards protested the characterisations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as unpatriotic owners of “forced labour camps.” Conservative lawmakers decided that if this was the history of slavery being taught in schools, the topic shouldn’t be taught. For them, challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty was “racially divisive.” At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time.”[4]

Sweet was not the only historian to attack the 1619 project. However, the Trotskyist movement, through the vehicle of the World Socialist Website, examined the true class nature of this falsification of history by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It said, “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history through the prism of race and racial conflict.”

In a Major article published both on the website and in book form, The website wrote, “The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labour but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.”

Bottom of Form

Sweet’s capitulation before social media was not a pretty sight. There has been no precedent for such an act of public contrition by the president of the AHA, not even in 1950s America. But deeper forces are at play than Sweet’s abject surrender. The witchhunt of Sweet indicates the advanced level of censorship and decline in American intellectual life. As David North and Tom Mackaman wrote in a letter published in the April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review: “It is high time for an intense and critical examination of the politics and social interests underlying the contemporary fixation with the unscientific category of racial identity, and its use as a battering ram against genuine historical scholarship. The Sweet Affair reveals that the time for this critical examination is well past due.”

Further Reading

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[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism

[2] Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present

James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022

[3] American Historical Association president issues groveling apology after racialist social media attack-wsws.org

[4]   Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present

James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022

Comment: Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World Los Angeles Review of Books. August 31, 2023

Christopher Thompson

Every now and then, Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes, puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have important implications for the world in which we now live.

 For support for these contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters, the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so, Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now, the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done with us if Ed Simon is correct. 

There is no doubt that Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern world is quite another matter altogether. 

Behind these disputable propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions. 

The idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries - in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London - it is all too easy to forget the immense suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from 1646 until the Restoration in 1660. 

A terrible price was paid for the political and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.