Review: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens-Narrated by Hugh Grant- Audible Studios 2024

 “Oh Heaven, could you have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at”.

Charles Dickens

“[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.

Karl Marx

“Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official, respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course, enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child, including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.”

David Walsh

“ In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. ”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I would be lying if I said I celebrate Christmas. It is a time to eat and relax and probably write, as this article written on Christmas day, testifies. I tend to observe Christmas, and one of my few traditions is to spend Christmas with Charles Dickens.

Specifically A Christmas Carol. First, I read the book for the first time this Christmas, and second, I listened to this excellent audiobook by Hugh Grant. Grant is a much-underrated actor, and this audiobook is superbly narrated.

Everyone knows the story inside out. First published as a novella by Chapman & Hall on Dec. 19 1843. Dickens was not the only social commentator at the time of writing a Christmas Carol. Karl Marx, a great admirer of Dickens, walked the same London streets for over 20 years.  Marx, Engels and Dickens were horrified by and wrote about the squalor produced by the Industrial Revolution. Engel's famous work captured the poverty and squalor in England.[1]

There is, of course, a world of difference between Marx, Engels and Dickens. However, you would not glean that from numerous radical organisations that want to claim Dickens as a radical socialist and champion of the working class. As the Stalinist Nick Matthews writes, “It would be nice to think, too, that Marx’s use of the metaphor of the spectre that begins The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe…” so soon after those in A Christmas Carol, is more than coincidental.”[2]

This may well be correct, but the writer George Orwell understood Dicken’s class position much better. He wrote, “Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and despite his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed, but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.

It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’ without showing much awareness of who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton, ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England’, and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, dirt, and life upon the straggling streets, and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc., etc.”[3]

While Vladimir Lenin hated Dickens, Marx liked him and wrote “ “[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.

To close, as Paul Bond wrote, “ It is In the 154 years since the death of the author, none of the central contradictions of the existing social order have been resolved. The exploitation so vividly portrayed in Dickens’s works continues to be a feature of everyday life over vast swathes of the planet, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Yet, even in those countries where grinding poverty was ameliorated in some measure through the struggles of the working class and the establishment of the welfare state introduced under the shadow of the Russian Revolution, there is a serious risk of a return to the Dickensian nightmare.”[4]

 

 

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[1]  Condition of the Working Class in England Written: September 1844 to March 1845   www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

[2] A Christmas Carol and the Communist Manifesto- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/christmas-carol-and-communist-manifesto

[3] George Orwell-Charles Dickens-orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english

[4] Today’s social divide and the Charles Dickens bicentenary-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/02/dick-f23.html

Comment On The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024

 I want to comment on the recent article on the World Socialist website entitled The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover. The article is concise and spot-on. It is a culmination of months of analysis provided by WSWS.org on the current betrayal by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).

The CWU has become an open mouthpiece of Royal Mail and Kretinsky himself. Since the betrayal of the last postal strike, the union has worked around the clock to pave the way for the takeover of Royal Mail by Kretinsky.

As the recent article by Hyland and Tiernan states:

“The CWU’s deal with Kretinsky, “Rebuilding Royal Mail: A Framework Agreement between EP Group and CWU”, was unanimously endorsed by the CWU Postal Executive Tuesday. It sets out the union’s corporatist partnership with EP Group’s investors and gives union officials a seat at the boardroom table.”[1]

It goes on, “ Ward claimed the agreements with Kretinsky “give us the best chance of rebuilding Royal Mail.”Nothing could be further from the truth. The agreements seek Royal Mail’s transformation into a gig-economy parcel business to compete with Amazon. It is part of a global restructuring of the post and logistics sector, using AI and automation to slash thousands of jobs.”

Now, compare this analysis of a genuine and orthodox Marxist position to the analysis peddled by the UK Socialist Workers Party(SWP). In a recent article (which must be said is the only analysis the SWP has made in over five months at the least), "Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off, "[2] the SWP takes obfuscation to a new level.

They write.” The postal workers’ CWU union is positive about the deal. It insists that Kretinsky has signed up to significant protection against asset stripping and breaking up the company. And it says that it and the government now have a greater say in how the firm will be run”. This is a lie and completely disarms postal workers as to the true nature of the CWU, the Labour government and Kretinsky. The SWP has become not only a cover for the treachery of the CWU but has become a mouthpiece for Kretinsky, writing that “he pledges that he wants to invest in Royal Mail for the long term. Kretinsky says he has no plans for compulsory redundancies and instead wants to expand the workforce.” Again, this is a direct lie. It is clear to anyone that the SWP is now a junior partner of not only the CWU bureaucracy but also a mouthpiece of the Labour Government and Kretinsky himself.

Any postal  worker wishing to fight the CWU’s open betrayal should join the Postal Workers Rank-and File Committee/IWA-RFC and listen and participate in the  PWRFC’s next online meeting on Sunday, January 5, at 7 pm. It will discuss the takeover agreed upon between Kretinsky, the Labour government and the CWU and a strategy to fight back.

  

 

 

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[1] The CWU’s “framework agreement” backs Kretinsky’s Royal Mail takeover

Tony Robson, Laura Tiernan December 20 2024 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/20/yvdt-d20.html

[2] “Unions Should Battle on after Royal Mail sell-off-https://socialistworker.co.uk/trade-unions/royal-mail-deal/

The Soul of Men and Women Before Socialism by Ruth Hutchinson

How Socialists Might Inspire a Broad Section of the Working Class to Fight Once Again For Socialism. Some preliminary comments

 “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets sail.” 

Oscar Wilde

Socialism is not an empty word to me. It means different things to different people, but for me, it is about a better world. In this world, there is no war, poverty, manmade diseases, oppression, manipulation and exploitation. Humans enter into a completely different set of relations where they associate freely to decide what is needed, how it should be produced and how it is distributed. We (the people) democratically control the vast resources of the world and set them to work for the benefit of the many. As Wilde comments, there is a place here for Utopia, Imagination and Vision.

How this new world might come about in the 21st century is problematic but not impossible. Utopian thinkers have been given little respect in the Marxist movement of the 20th century and this one and I believe they should re-examine Marx’s relationship, Lenin’s relationship also to this. Marx and Engels had huge respect for the Utopian Socialists and Lenin thought that not enough “useful dreaming” occurred within the party of what a future society would look like. What Marx did not respect were the sterile sects that followed the great Utopian thinker. There is confusion and a misunderstanding of Marx within some sections of the Marxist movement and what passes as the Revolutionary Left.

The world is a crazy and irrational place. But what is particularly crazy is this, and this really is what has been taking place. Ask a Socialist what Socialism looks like, and they won’t be able to tell you. They might say, “We don’t have a blueprint for Socialism”, “It is not our job to prescribe this sort of thing but to be fought out by the workers themselves”. This is a terrible state of affairs, and if socialists don’t have a clue about what a future society will or could look like, then how the hell is the working class going? This is the product of an objectivist outlook very common in sectarian organisations and has nothing in common with a dialectical philosophical outlook that Marx, Engels or Lenin used.

Speaking about a better world should not be a taboo subject. Speaking about the ills that we face under this system of commodity production where a ruling class exploits without the blink of an eye, what could be done to replace this and how to replace it should be given priority and a hearing. What we are facing right now and what we have lived through these past 30 years is crazy. It has been one crisis, war, disaster or scandal after another. The average person is absolutely fed up and is crying out for leadership and political representation that reflects their wishes, and that is up to the task of inspiring the working class and leading it to victory. Right now, we don’t have that.

The nineteenth century was imbued with an entirely different spirit, as we see in Oscar Wilde’s work. We see it in William Morris, too. Morris was even brave enough to write the novel “News From Nowhere” which wants to express some ideas about what a future society might look like. Where are our modern day equivalents to Wilde and Morris? They don’t exist. But I anticipate a renewed interest in these writers. Just like Gerrard Winstanley was rescued from obscurity, other writers and thinkers will hopefully be rescued. I hope to be a part of that rescue mission. But what does it have to say to us in the 21st century?

The human spirit is a tremendous force that can endure and overcome, but it has to be imbued with hope. I want to say that where there’s a will, there’s a way, but the reverse is also true. Where there’s a way, there will more likely be a will. The socialists are not showing the way or giving inspiration because they choose to look away and engage in constant debates and arguments that the working class doesn’t give a shit about. The working class has no time to wade through 1000 pages of some tract without immediate alleviating wisdom. It is too worn down to constantly hear about the betrayals and losses right now. That’s for the revolutionary to bring to the working class.

In all the jobs I’ve had, they are front-facing with members of the public. I do not see myself as separate from them, for I know I face the same struggles. I don’t shy away but want to understand the patient in my chair and ask how has this disease process taken hold, what is the aetiology of this and the pathogenesis of that? When we understand the enemy, we have a chance at treatment, but the success of that will depend on many things and will depend on how inspired the patient is and how confident they are at winning. Without hope, my patient may not be fair too well!

The socialist movement is no different. The last great movement we had that was guided by a belief in a better world was in the ’60s. Where are the equivalents of Martin Luther King and JFK? Where are our musicians that are equivalent to Jimmy Hendrix, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain or Tupac? Where are the equivalents of Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or Oppenheimer? Where are they? Where are the Historians that are equivalent to Hill or Thompson?  What about new Orwells, Steinbecks or Millers?  We have lost something, and it was a faith, passion and vision that the future could be different. There is a total malaise around this, with the Marxist movement also contributing by failing to correct this by keeping a vision of a better future alive by examining how the productive forces could be used creatively to meet real wants and needs. Whatever your politics or beliefs are is not my concern. All I can hope for is that I am read with an open mind and given the basic right to express an opinion. One thing I can agree on is the question of dead dogs. A whole load of dead dogs also lie on the bodies of Utopian thinkers that have been placed there by so-called Marxists. They ignore these thinkers, unlike Marx and don’t know how to deal with them. The movement is sterile now and impoverished due to adaptation to objectivism and ignoring the subjective factor. Marxists have to win over both hearts and minds and if it chooses (the revolutionary Marxist movement) to ignore the heart of humans.

Then fascism will appeal more confidently as it knows better how to exploit repressed emotion. It’s not a game anymore, and just like Orwell talks about in The Road to Wigan Pier, we still have the same problems. The working class is not attracted to asceticism or sectarianism, nor am I. What I propose to do in my writing is rescue some branches of thought and ideas, give them a hearing and try to appeal to those that are more thoughtful.

I recently contacted a revolutionary party and asked what socialists would do about the dark web. I wondered what the banking system would look like under socialism. I have received no reply, and it must have been three months ago that I wrote in. I have questions that are not being answered. I am not surprised that they are not being answered, but I'm surprised that I might have to answer these myself. I know I don’t have all the answers but I sure know I will have to try and find some. There was also something that troubled me recently. It was a podcast and the host (posturing as a revolutionary) commented on someone liking Ska music and that that should be seen as a red flag. How the movement will attract the working class when it holds such prejudices is cause for major concern. They will remain a closed club, and Orwell knew this all too well.

As mentioned, I would like to rescue some thoughts, writers and thinkers from a pile of dead dogs and start to assimilate their thoughts and answer some of my very own burning questions. A burning question for me is why was it that Gerrard Winstanley was able to cut a path to a revolutionary road and his peers didn’t quite get there. What was peculiar to Winstanley that was absent in others? The same can be applied to Lenin. Why was Lenin able to see further? What is it about these human personalities and their experiences that enabled and gave birth to this? I believe the world is knowable and I believe that coincidence is just the measure of our ignorance. There is a reason for everything even if we don’t fully grasp what those reasons are right this moment, the searching shouldn’t stop. It is not enough for me to say that it was just the genius of Winstanley. I would love to examine the genesis of his thought, but his collected works are £300, and I don’t have that spare. What is interesting to me is that he replaced the word god with reason. I believe that since he married the daughter of a surgeon, being around the medical profession at that time had some bearing on him. It is a special profession with its Hippocratic oath and scientific method. It is also a profession that was not alienated from its own labour, and there was no division in the surgeon but a unity of manual and intellectual labour working for the greater good. This gave them a certain outlook that was quite separate and peculiar to other branches of activity. It is just a theory and yet to be fully explored, but Winstanley was different and I don’t see it just as an accident in that it can’t be explained. This is just my opinion, of course. Thanks for reading, and serious comments are welcome. This is just a piece of prose, and footnotes can be provided. I am just interested in getting things down on paper at this stage.

Some of the thinkers and trends I would like to comment on in the future or have an interest in reading are as follows:  Wiliam Morris, Erich Fromm, Freud, William Blake, The State of my Profession, The NHS, Trump, state of reason, the cultural level, P Diidy, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, John Potash, Shaun Attwood, John Wedger, the dark web, the Cabal/Illuminati, Q-Anon, Maggie Oliver, Judy Mikovich, Anthony Fauci, Andreas Moritz, Dr Robert Malone,Marcuse, Hegel, what appeals to me most about Marx’s thought. The Salem Witch Hunts, children’s literature, Anna Freud, Bruno Bettleheim, Marshall Berman and Oliver James. I will want to express what I have found interesting in their thought and why it is so. I can reflect on myself and ask what is piquing my interest. What is it that I am relating to? 

Here’s an example:  I believe and live by this as closely as possible. I don’t allow much into my house that I don’t find beautiful or useful. I hate waste, and I hate junk. William Morris was the same. Having been around art and design, I can relate well to Morris in what he has to say, and I would like to discuss his relevance but also ask why I am like this, too. Over the past 18 months since my child left to study a degree in chemistry I have had much freedom to explore and listen to many podcasts and spend more time socialising. There are trends and things happening in our world that I have not had the chance to explore or knowledge of. They should not be dismissed but given a hearing by the widest possible audience. I don’t know what I believe regarding some of it, as there isn’t enough evidence yet to make an informed conclusion, but I have been astonished by some of the things I have learnt. The question isn’t wheter it is true or not but is a fight to get access to information that will verify such questions. I will argue that revolutionaries should be a part of that fight if only they would listen. I write............................. to be continued.

I would like to draw attention to a paragraph from Christopher Hill’s “The World Turned Upside Down.”

“Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as “ the lunatic fringe.” Hill goes on to thank many people for their work, for without them and their work, subjects such as alchemy, astrology and natural magic can now take their place as reasonable subjects for rational men and women to be interested in. Further still, Hill says

“Historians would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase “lunatic fringe”. Lunacy, like beauty, maybe in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeenth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us to understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms and that the lunatic may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him”.

With that being said by such a respected historian, I hope that what I wish to discuss will be given the same respectful and open-minded treatment as Hill is urging for here, as there is much to be gleaned and learnt if one could just drop the arrogance and snobbishness. Hill echoes Erich Fromm here, who was a Freudo-Marxist who thought that when his patients were experiencing psychosis, they were fleeing into this peculiar state of thinking because they were escaping the insanity around them. In other words, the patient retreated into this state because they were sane but couldn’t square themselves to the conditions they were experiencing because the patient was actually more sane and found it intolerable. The protest couldn’t be expressed outwardly but was turned in on itself. It has to go somewhere, and that disturbance is felt within the psyche.

Now, just for a minute, think here. Out of all the words Hill has written, this chimes with me and out of all the other other possible paragraphs I choose this. That’s not an accident. Christopher Hill is good company to be in, and I’ve only just started to read him in the past 4 weeks. I have talked to many people in my life due to the work I have undertaken and come up against some very difficult positions and attitudes. They have to be understood, not dismissed outright. It won’t lead to anything new by dismissing it. Back in the 90’s, I was lucky enough to visit the Hayward Gallery, where the Prinzhorn collection was being exhibited. When the pieces are examined, and you know what you are looking at, Hill makes even more sense. The Prinzhorn Collection is for another time. But it is a collection of over 5000 pieces of art drawn by inpatients of psychiatric institutions. It is troubling what is being expressed visually but it finds expression nonetheless and is not as insane as one might think.

Sober. My Story. My Life. By Tony Adams and Ian Ridley, Simon & Schuster £9.99

“I’ve got no angst of the past any more. I’ve cleaned that up – I’m 28 years without a drink or a drug. I’m comfortable in my skin for the first time in my life. I’ve grown up. There are no tentacles from the past now.”

Tony Adams

‘I have an illness. I’ve accepted that.’

Paul Merson

Tony Adams’ two books, addicted and now Sober, make it abundantly clear that his struggles with alcoholism have impacted greatly on his life and relationships with other people.

Astonishingly, Addicted was published in 1999 while Adams was still Arsenal and England captain. Addicted, like its sequel, Sober was a brutally honest account of his life as a recovering alcoholic. “I walk the walk today. I’m fully recovered but still go to regular meetings and three, four prisons a year, passing the message on to the newcomer that help is out there.”

Sober, published in 2018, covers the last five years of Adams's playing career and his attempts at football management. Like Addicted, Sober is written with the help of writer  Ian Ridley. Ridley is an excellent writer. How much of the book Adams wrote would be interesting to know, but his voice comes from the pages. Ridley himself is a recovering alcoholic. In a 2017 interview Ridley explains how he first met Adams.

“I knew Tony of course, with him playing for Arsenal and England and me a national paper football correspondent, but he had little liking for the press. We met properly, introduced by Paul Merson, when Tony got sober in August 1996. I had been sober from my alcoholism for about eight years by that time. With Addicted, he wanted to get across to people who might have a drink problem that there was a solution and help available. I recall a wonderful moment when it was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1998. It didn’t win, but at the award ceremony, a waiter came up to me with a glass of mineral water and said: “I’m sorry your book didn’t win, Mr Ridley, but if it’s any consolation, I read this book a couple of months ago, realised I had a problem, went to AA, and I’ve been sober ever since. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I rang Tony. “That’s why we wrote it,” he said. “Not to win awards but to help people.”[1]

When asked by the interviewer so why the sequel?. Ridley replied, “Tony wanted to do Sober 20 years on to show that it is possible to have a great life without the booze. He also wanted to tell people what happened after Arsenal. There is plenty of new material, including Sporting Chance and Tony’s times as Portsmouth coach when they won the FA Cup. He also talks about his experiences in Azerbaijan and China, when he suffered a heart attack in the former and virtually a nervous breakdown in the latter.”

The book, unsurprisingly, is dominated by the language of AA and recovery. Adams is proud of his long struggle to found Sporting Chance, a charity dedicated to helping athletes and women with addictions. In a Guardian interview, he describes reaching rock bottom and needing help: “I needed a lot of pain. Alcohol gave me a good hiding; prison, intensive care, pissing myself, shitting myself, still not giving up. Do you know what I mean? Sleeping with people I didn’t want to sleep with. I have to remind myself at the end of my drinking, I did not want to live, but I didn’t know how to kill myself. I was at a ‘jumping off point’, as we call it. I got there, and only then could I ask for help.”[2]

Adams's life in management was not as successful as his playing career. As one reviewer recounts, Adams “ took various courses and coaching badges before trying his hand at management with Wycombe. After resigning there, he returned to education before joining Portsmouth as Harry Redknapp’s assistant during their high-spending days, including an FA Cup victory. He ultimately became manager after Harry left but appears never to have had much chance due to budget cuts before asking to be fired to save himself from resigning. From here, Adams's career took an odd, international turn. After briefly coaching in Azerbaijan, he stepped into a general manager/consultant-type role in building a small Azerbaijani team from the ground up. This was followed by a connection with a Chinese football investor as Adams took on a general consulting role for Jiang Lizhang, who owned a club in China and purchased Granada in Spain.”[3]

The book will appeal to a wide audience outside of football. For Arsenal fans. It contains Adam’s insight about his footballing journey. The latest publication includes a new chapter on Adams's relationship with the former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. Both books cover this relationship. Adams has enormous respect and fondness for Wenger; however, their relationship blew hot and cold. Perhaps the new book's most controversial aspect is Adams questioning Arsene Wenger's coaching.

Adams also criticised Wenger for staying too long at Arsenal: “He probably had an addiction. He couldn’t let go at the end – he’s a typical addict. He’s completely obsessed with the game every single minute. It maybe cost him relationships, and I think it cost him his job and inability to let go. It’s been bloody depressing for the last 10 years. What is to blame? “Recruitment. It’s been very poor. You get players two ways: academy or buy them in. We haven’t had the money to buy them through the transition, and I don’t think we have had the network, to be honest; 17 backroom staff gone, six scouts gone, Stevie Morrow [head of youth scouting] gone, probably the best academy scout in the country sacked. To bring players through agents it might be the way the game is going, but not how I would build. “The whole club had different values. It was smaller. It’s a different game. It’s a business now. That level of connection within the club, a disconnect with the fans, is a real issue in the game.”

Perhaps if I were being super critical, I would say that the book does not go into the deep connection between sports such as football and the huge rise of gambling, drug taking and alcoholism in society. Paul Merson’s recent documentary was a damaging indictment of the Gambling Industry’s profit-making out of human misery.[4] As Adams states, “Of the 30% of patients who come to the clinic with an addiction, 70% have a problem with gambling. “Addictions within football, we’re talking gambling,” The Premier League, it’s a bit of an epidemic to be honest.” Sober could have used the numerous academic articles that have looked into the connection between Sports and alchoholism.

In his paper, Carwyn Jones argues “ that football plays a questionable role in promoting two potentially problematic activities, namely drinking alcohol and gambling. Gambling and alcohol companies sponsor clubs and competitions and pay to advertise their products at the stadium and during television coverage. Consequently, millions of fans, including children, are exposed to the marketing of these restricted products. The latter are exposed despite regulations prohibiting such advertising and promotion in other contexts. The promotion of these activities to children and adults increases levels of consumption, which in turn increases the number of problem drinkers and gamblers in society. High-profile footballers play a further role in normalising drinking and gambling. They are role models whose actions influence others. Their excessive drinking and gambling activities provide poor examples for football fans, young and old.”[5]

Sober is an excellent companion book to Addicted. Like Addicted, it is a brutally honest appraisal of Tony Adams's addiction and mental health struggles. In achieving sobriety, he has become an inspiration to other recovering addicts and alcoholics.

References

1.    Alcoholism and recovery: A case study of a former professional footballer

Carwyn JonesView all authors and affiliations Volume 49, Issue 3-4

https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690213516618

2.    FOOTBALL, ALCOHOL AND GAMBLING:  AN UNHOLY TRINITY?

CARWYN JONES- Vol. 51, 2 – 2015 Pag. 5–19

3.    Chapter 7 - The interrelationship between alcoholism, depression, and anxiety Richard Tindle , Farah Ghafar, Eid Abo Hamza Ahmed A. Moustafa The Nature of Depression-An Updated Review 2021, Pages 111-133

 

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[1] www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/books-and-reviews/ridleys-20-year-journey-with-tony-adams/

[2]www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jan/31/tony-adams-alcohol-gave-me-good-hiding-i-needed-pain-sporting-chance-arsenal

[3] allsportsbooks.reviews/category/soccer/page/5/

[4] Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery- by Paul Merson- Headline Book Publishing – September 16 2021-atrumpetofsedition.org/its-up-for-grabs-now/

[5] Football, Alcohol and Gambling:  An unholy trinity? KINANTHROPOLOGICA Vol. 51, 2 – 2015

 

The Portuguese Workers' Revolution 1974-5 £3.00 by Mark Osborn-2024 -Pamphlet - 44 pages ISBN 978-1-909639-70-6

The Portuguese Workers' Revolution 1974-5 pamphlet by Mark Osborn has been re-published to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1974-5. The labour movement led by the syndicalist CGT, which belonged to the Portuguese anarchists, FARP, the Socialist-led Portuguese Worker Federation, and the small Inter-Sindical Commission led by the Communist Party entered an unholy alliance to betray the revolution. The Pabloite groups, along with the pseudo-lefts, who covered up this betrayal, acted as secondary agencies of imperialism. While purporting to examine the politics of the Portuguese worker's revolution, this pamphlet covers this betrayal up. Despite playing only a minor role in the betrayal, Workers Liberty has workers' and students' blood on its hands. The betrayal of the revolution is all the more pertinent since, had the revolution succeeded, it would have delivered a mighty blow to the solar plexus of international capital and inspired revolutionary movements worldwide.

On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers overthrew Portugal's fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could take back power at the expense of a few limited reforms. The popular front government established by the revolution, which contained a significant Communist Party presence under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, handed over power without a murmur from the numerous Pseudo left groups.

The coup was started by young military captains in the national armed forces. In her book, Raquel Varela[1] emphasises that these were only captains as if this made them unconscious socialists. Rank and file soldiers did indeed come over to the revolution, as experienced by Bob Light, who saw first-hand soldiers giving the clenched fist salute and waving red carnations. Slogans such as " the soldiers are sons of the workers" and "down with capitalist exploitation" were also heard on the streets. But despite these sections of the rank-and-file soldiers won the revolution, the Portuguese bourgeoisie would still control the army.

The Carnation Revolution was the latest of a line of revolutionary movements betrayed by Stalinism and Pabloism. Beginning in May 1968 in Paris,  the 1969 'hot autumn' in Italy, strike waves in Germany and Britain in the early 1970s and the struggle in Greece against military rule in 1973-4. International Socialist leader Tony Cliff argued that 'Portugal, the weakest link in the capitalist chain in Europe, can become the launching pad for the socialist revolution in the whole continent.'

Cliff's remarks were pure bravado as his International Socialist movement ensured this did not happen. Instead of being 'the launching pad of the socialist revolution', the defeat of the Portuguese revolution paved the way for various neoliberalism regimes. Varela’s book is a political amnesty for the betrayals of the Stalinists and radical groups such as the IS.

Although the revolution originated in Africa, the 1974 revolution was ultimately shaped by Portugal's belated historical development. As Paul Mitchell describes in his 2024 article, "By 1973, there were some 42,000 companies in Portugal—one-third of them employing fewer than ten workers—but about 150 companies dominated the entire economy. Most were related to foreign capital but were headed by a few wealthy Portuguese families (Espirito Santo, de Melo, de Brito, Champalimaud). For example, the de Melos' monopoly company Companhia União Fabril (CUF) owned parts of Guinea-Bissau and produced 10 per cent of the gross national product.   Despite this industrialisation, a third of the population still worked as agricultural labourers, many in large estates or latifundia. An estimated 150,000 people lived in shantytowns concentrated around the capital, Lisbon. Food shortages and economic hardship—wages were the lowest in Europe at US$10 a week in the 1960s—led to the mass emigration of nearly 1 million people to other European countries, Brazil and the colonies.   The 1960s also saw the emergence of liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Fighting three guerrilla movements for over a decade drained the Portuguese economy and labour force. Nearly half the budget was spent on maintaining more than 150,000 African troops.[2]

He continues, “Compulsory military service lasting for four years, combined with poor military pay and conditions, laid the basis for grievances and the development of oppositional movements amongst the troops. These conscripts became the basis for the emergence of an underground movement known as the "Movement of the Captains." The continuing economic drain caused by the African military campaigns was exacerbated by the world financial crisis that developed in the late 1960s.”

In the 1970s, the Portuguese ruling elite confronted a massive strike wave at home and uprisings in the colonies. Nearly one half of the national budget was spent keeping 150,000 troops abroad fighting the national liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. Compulsory military service combined with low pay intensified grievances in the army. It stimulated an oppositional movement amongst the troops known as the "Movement of the Captains," which later developed into the Armed Forces Movement (MFA).

The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) or "movement of the Captains", glorified by Varela, became an important bulwark against revolution once it was in power alongside the PCP. To stop the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class, the MFA invited the Communist Party (PCP) into government. The Communist Party was asked to take part in the First Provisional Government in May 1974 and took part in all six provisional governments. These governments were popular fronts containing trade unions, the Socialist Party, the Church, and the upper hierarchy of the armed forces.

The Socialist Party and the Church initially did not want the Communists in the government. Still, military sections knew the PCP would be useful in controlling rank-and-file soldiers and the working class. As Varela herself points out, “'The Portuguese Communist Party was prepared to abandon its radical army supporters (and a great many others) in exchange for a continued stake in government. The military left had become a burden on the Communist Party because its performance undermined the balance of power with the Nine and peaceful coexistence agreements between the USA, Western Europe and the USSR. Some 200 soldiers and officers, plus a handful of building workers, were arrested' (p.246).

The PCP was outlawed, and its leadership was imprisoned or driven into exile. Following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the party had been purged in 1929, and Bento Gonçalves, who had only joined the organisation the previous year, was installed as General Secretary.

Cunhal joined the PCP in 1931 whilst studying law at university and left for the Soviet Union to attend a congress of Communist youth in September 1935. It was at this time that the Stalinist bureaucracy began to advance its policy of building "popular fronts" with "democratic" bourgeois governments and liberal-reformist elements worldwide, supposedly to combat fascism and defend the USSR. Cunhal, who came to epitomise the policy of popular frontism in Portugal, became the leader of the youth organisation and joined the Central Committee of the PCP in 1936 at 22.

One of the most important questions of the revolution concerned the political nature of the MFA and its "armed intervention" unit, the Continental Operations Command (COPCON—Comando Operacional do Continente)

COPCON  was composed of 5,000 elite troops. Its leader was Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. To cover over its real intentions, the MFA said it was in favour of an "alliance of the MFA and the people."The PSP, PCP, and Pseudo groups never challenged this blatant lie. Instead, the PCP declared the MFA was a "guarantor of democracy" and developed close relations with Carvalho, General Vasco Goncalves and other members of the Junta.

The fact that the various popular front governments could operate with impunity is down to the role played by pseudo-Lefts like the IS. Readers need to know the history of the IS. As Mitchell points out, the “International Socialist (IS) organisation (today's Socialist Workers Party in Britain) was represented by the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP—Partido Revolucionário do Proletariado). The founders of the International Socialists had broken from the Fourth International in the 1940s, claiming that the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellites was a new class in a new social system (state capitalism). This granted the Stalinist bureaucracy a certain legitimacy, not due to its parasitic character, but expressed a prostration before the post-war stabilisation of imperialism. The IS' radical phraseology, its glorification of trade union syndicalism combined with a semi-anarchist stance, served only to conceal its refusal to challenge the political domination of the working class by the social democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies.”

The promotion of the popular front by the IS had nothing in common with orthodox Marxism. The following is its analysis of the popular front: “Poder Popular (popular power), underpinned by the Aliança Povo-MFA (an alliance of the people and the MFA), emerged as the ideology for the MFA. It set out to unite the military with workers, land workers, tenants and slum-dwellers. The military made use of the prestige acquired through carrying out the coup against the regime. Popular power was perceived as the living alternative to the bourgeois focus on parliamentary democracy. This is not to say that the army and workers were always united, but the impact of the people's movement on the armed forces, and vice versa, came to be an integral part of the Portuguese story. But the slogan "Unity of the people and the MFA" was double-edged: not only did the people influence the army, but also the revolutionary movement's reliance upon the radicals in the army was to be part of its undoing”.

The reader should compare the statement above with how Leon Trotsky described and evaluated the Popular Front: "The question of questions at the moment is the Popular Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical manoeuvre to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism, for it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the ‘Communists' [i.e., Stalinists] and the Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and were in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. They demanded to break this Popular Front, destroy the Cadets' alliance, and create a genuine workers' and peasants' government."

To conclude, the fact that after 45 years of the revolution, its “memory” is still in dispute is down to the treacherous role of the various Pabloite and Pseudo Left groups such as Workers Liberty. As Paul Mitchell points out, the Portuguese Revolution “would have been a mighty blow to international capital and inspired worldwide movements in the 1970s. Only the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Portuguese supporters, the League for the Construction of the Revolutionary Party (LCRP), called for the PCP and PSP to break from the bourgeois parties, the state machine and the MFA. It demanded the dissolution of the army and the creation of workers', peasants' and soldiers' soviets in opposition to the MFA and its proposals for a Constituent Assembly. 

 

Further Reading

The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell Hardcover – 4 April 2024 by Alex Fernandes 

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[1] A People's History of the Portuguese Revolution

[2] Fifty years since Portugal’s Carnation Revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/24/fgtz-a24.html