A Trumpet of Sedition

Sunday, 18 June 2023

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen-Peter Apps-Oneworld Publications 10/11/2022-Paperback- 352 Pages.

Peter Apps's book on the Grenfell Fire is a well-written and empathetic account of the corporate murder of 72 people. The book combines a degree of humanity, terror and technical detail in one book. Apps is a journalist and editor for 'Inside Housing' and has written significant articles on the Grenfell Inquiry on Twitter and in newspapers that few have matched.

The Grenfell Inquiry into the fire has lasted five years and has largely been a whitewashing of events. Apps is heavily critical of the Inquiry but not to the extent that he believes this was an act of social murder. It has been clear from the outset that the ruling elite has covered up the true nature of this crime. Such a cover-up has been compared to the one involving the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in which 97 people died.

The British ruling elite is an expert in denying justice using public inquiries. They are deaf to the demands of the survivors. Yet still, millions of people live in unsafe, dangerous housing. Still, the government even refused to implement all of the limited housing safety measures recommended by Moore-Bick.

As Charles Hixson and Robert Stevens write, "The Inquiry bore witness to endless self-justifications by corporate and government bodies, shamelessly passing the buck for the use of shoddy, dangerous and illegal materials on the refurbishment of the tower even as documents confirmed that residents' concern about safety was treated with contempt. It has been painfully obvious to everyone since the immediate aftermath of the fire that a small number of individuals are culpable for the mass deaths at Grenfell, including the owners/decision makers at major contractor Rydon, cladding manufacturer Arconic, Irish insulation provider Kingspan, manufacturer of foam insulation, Celotex, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and its Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) which managed the tower".[1]

One of the most important parts of the book is how Apps writes about the night of the fire, as told through the experiences of the people involved. According to one writer: "They put a human context to the tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives were changed forever by what happened".

Still, after six years since the fire, nobody has been charged, let alone jailed. As Peter Apps correctly states, "Grenfell can feel like a past story—it's not. It's something that needs to be kept in the public eye if we want to see the companies responsible held to account. Grenfell didn't have to happen. This was a problem people were worried about—adding combustible materials onto the outside of buildings. The book brings together the story about how a tower block in one of the richest parts of the richest cities in the world clad a building in material chemically similar to petrol."

Apps book shows that The Grenfell Tower Fire resulted from profiting, negligence and a lack of regard for people living in social housing. A raft of construction companies, regulators, the Tory-led council and the government, have blood on their hands.

As the Marxist writer Frederick Engles once wrote, "When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."[2]

While Apps doesn't entirely agree with the concept of social murder, his book is well worth the read and would seem to have sold widely and deservedly so.

[1] UK: Grenfell Tower fire inquiry hearings end with guilty evading justice

8 August 2022-wsws.org

[2] The Conditions of the working class in Britain-Frederick Engels

Monday, 5 June 2023

Some Thoughts on Art and Identity

One of the more reactionary and harmful dictums that seem prevalent in today's society is that artists should only write about their own skin colour or gender and not choose a subject, show a world or create a character that differs from the artist in skin colour or gender.

According to James McDonald in his excellent article Where is our Zola? "This position, taken up by selfish elements of the upper-middle class, ultimately boils down to a scramble for the limited number of dollars spent on Art, literature and music. "Stay in your lane" is the popularised refrain for this self-serving prescription, which is cravenly obeyed by a disturbing proportion of otherwise reputable artists.

Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called "sensitivity readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive" or "inaccurate" material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of "offence" and "sensitivity" are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like "offence" and "sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."

It is rare nowadays for any artist, let alone a writer, to go against the stream on this matter. To her eternal credit, the writer Rebecca F Kuang has opposed the idea that authors should not write about other races or gender. At the recent Hay Festival, Kuang spoke of the 'weird kind of identity politics in American publishing. It really does not make sense to categorise books this way. Kazuo Ishiguro: you'd never find his books in the sci-fi fantasy section, but The Buried Giant is.” Also at the Hay Festival was the world-renowned author Pat Barker[1] who said she distrusts publishers'' 'fashionable' efforts to boost diversity.

Kuang is a well-respected and best-selling author of books such as Babel and The Poppy War. Her most recent publication YellowFace" is a biting satire on the publishing industry. Saying of Yellolwface that "If I were a debut writer, I wouldn't have dared to write this book.

Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their own race "deeply frustrating and pretty illogical". Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race".

As the Marxist writer Niles Niemuth wrote, "The American ruling class (alongside its European counterparts) is promoting racialist politics and racial division to undermine the class unity of the working class amidst the rise of social inequality to ever greater heights, the eruption of mass protests over police violence and the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally. The push to present every social problem in the United States as a racial issue is a reflection of the deepening crisis of world capitalism and an effort by the Democrats, the trade unions and the pseudo-left to stave off a united, independent working-class offensive against the capitalist system."[2]

Kuang recently wrote that "You have to imagine outside of your lived experience – to write truthfully, with compassion". While it is doubtful that Kuang has read much Marxist material on Art, her comments are perceptive. They should open up a debate about the nature of Art in a capitalist society.

She would do well to take on board the thoughts of one of the most important Marxist writers, A.K. Voronsky, when he asked, "When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of Art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in this regard, it is when he writes organically bound up with our general conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation."[3]

He continues, "There is no need to confuse the artist's special gift of insight with the desire to strike the reader by producing a beautiful turn of phrase, a special style, or a totally new work of Art. Such a desire usually leads to pretentiousness, deliberate overrefinement, excessive floweriness and artificiality. The work becomes incomprehensible, and the reader, like Turgenev's deacon, says to himself: "Dark is the water in the clouds," and "Thus be it beyond our ken." Many contemporary poets and prose-writers commit this sin, and they confuse the ability of the artist to see what no one else has seen with a desire to astound the reader."

Kuang does not hold out much hope that the publishing industry will change. If anything, she believes it will get worse. Noises made in 2021 to support change went out the window. She says there was “a lot of chatter, but no substantive support for those authors, no real commitment to diversify lists or the faces of people working on the other side of publishing."

When the staff at HarperCollins, her publisher, went on strike for better pay and working conditions while her novel was in production – Kuang co-hosted strike rallies for the union. When I asked her about her hopes for the publishing industry and her writing going forward, she answered, "I hope everyone unionises."It is hoped this militancy is reflected in her future work. I highly recommend Yellowface and all her previous novels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker

[2]Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html

[3] — A. Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life

Sunday, 28 May 2023

Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery- by Paul Merson- Headline Book Publishing – September 16 2021

Hooked is Paul Merson's brutally honest and eminently readable memoir about his thirty-year addiction to drugs, gambling and drinking. This is not your run-of-the-mill footballer's memoir, as it was nominated for the Whitbread book prize and serialised in The Times newspaper.

Merson was a professional footballer winning two First Division titles with Arsenal and was arguably one of the finest players of his generation. But for all his football career and beyond, he was addicted to alcohol, drugs, and gambling. His addictions, coupled with deep depression, led him to thoughts of suicide 'I've come to realise that I'm powerless over alcohol ... I'm an alcoholic. My drinking and gambling have left a lot of wreckage.'I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't go on anymore. I couldn't see a way out.'

Fortunately, he managed to face his demons, saying, 'One day, I was walking home from the pub late on a Sunday evening, and I thought I've had enough of feeling like this, every day of my life. I rang up Alcoholics Anonymous the next day, and since then, I haven't had a drink.'

Merson estimates he lost over £7 million on gambling since becoming addicted, playing cards as a teenager. He even took the deposit he and his wife had saved for a new home and spent it on gambling. Although not mentioned in the book, when Merson was asked by Cambridge and Imperial College London researchers to have his brain hot-wired to one of their machines, it went haywire when he felt tempted to have a bet. His brain was docile when shown images of family life and beautiful natural scenery, and when shown dice throwing or a roulette wheel, it went mad.

Merson's story is by no means unique, as one person a day dies from a gambling-related suicide. It is estimated by the Gambling Commission that there are over two million people in the UK who have a gambling addiction. Most of these people run up large debts and are prone to depression; some end up killing themselves.

While Merson is heavily critical of the gambling industry, his book does not delve into the capitalist nature of the gambling industry. The industry is one of the most predatory enterprises, predicated on the mantra that the 'house' always wins. Merson's despair is felt by millions of people like him, and the betting companies like Bet365 prey on this despair and make millions out of it. It is no accident that Britain's highest-paid CEO has built her fortune on online gambling. Recently Denise Coates made an obscene £265 million.

As Jean Shaoul writes, "Gambling revenues are overwhelmingly based upon the exploitation of the poor as well as those on the threshold of poverty, for whom the dream of winning provides a means of escaping a world of constant nagging worry over how to make ends meet, horrendous journeys to work and then being exploited in low-wage jobs by highly paid bosses. General statistics for gambling, including online betting, show that just under half the UK's population (48 per cent) participate. After this, breakdowns focus on gender and age rather than income and social class. However, betting shops are most likely to be found in Britain's poorest communities, with the east London borough of Newham hosting 86 shops, including 18 on one high street, each with their permitted maximum of four fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) that can take £100 bets every 20 seconds. This contrasts with 56 in the southwest London borough, which has a similar population but is considerably wealthier.[1]

Merson does not sugarcoat this terrible period of his life, and his book is an unflinchingly honest memoir of his battle with addiction. He is now recovering, having not touched a drop of alcohol or gambled. But his biggest problem is whether he could continue sober. In his own words, he says, "This is it. This is the last chance saloon." I hope he makes it, not because I am an Arsenal fan and Merson was one of a group of outstanding, talented footballers, but because he is trying to survive.

Perhaps more importantly, Hooked has opened up a national debate about addiction, depression and the damage they cause. As Shaoul states, gambling is an unhealthy industry emphasises social inequality, acting as a cash nexus, transforming everyone and everything into a commodity. Its growth is another example of social decay, a parasitic enterprise that appeals to the worst instincts: greed, individualism and indifference. Such diseased enterprises are the norm today, with governments embracing gambling at the same time as profits of the banks and other financial institutions have become ever more reliant on forms of speculation, divorced from the creation of social wealth, such as trading in currency futures."[2]

[1] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html

[2] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html

Saturday, 20 May 2023

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution-Gender, Genre, and History Writing-by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille-Hardback-Published:10 October 2022-368 Pages

Yet after all this he is gone hence, and I remain, an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson, Final Meditation'

"I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to the world" — Lucy Hutchinson.

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille is an extremely important and long overdue evaluation of Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. The memoirs, although written between 1664 and 1667, were not published until 1806, and the Memoirs were largely forgotten in the twentieth century. It could be said that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille rescues Lucy Hutchinson from the condescension of history.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille has had a little help in this rescue mission. The early 1980s saw more historians and literary scholars interested in Hutchinson and other female writers. Hutchinson's book challenges the assumption that early modern women could not write the history of the English Revolution. Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson was a reader of ancient history and a gifted historian of the English Revolution. She should be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

The 17th-century philosopher and historian Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, a regicide who sent Charles I to his execution in 1649. Without his wife's memoirs, this significant figure of the English Revolution would have been lost to history.

Lucy Hutchinson was born in 1620 to a class of landowning merchants. She had a comfortable childhood, and her father was a lieutenant of the Tower of London. Hutchinson was part of a growing gentry, later among the most dominant class forces during the English Revolution. From a political standpoint, she dominated the marriage. She was able to pursue a significant political involvement that was not available to most women. However, she could not publish under her name using her husbands or remaining anonymous.

At the beginning of the English Revolution, the Hutchinson family rejected the Royalist cause and became firm Republicans. Her book Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extremely important documentation of the English Revolution. While an intimate account of her husband's actions during the revolution, it is a highly lucid political and sociological analysis of British history's only successful social revolution.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille seeks to restore Hutchinson to the pantheon of writers of the 17^th-century English Revolution. Figures like Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important early materialist thinkers, tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the English Revolution.

Hobbes wrote at a time of war And revolution in Europe. Particularly endemic was the Thirty Years War. This war shaped Hobbes's world view leading him to write his world-famous view of the state of nature expressed in chapter 13 of Leviathan, in which he describes the life of man in a state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was how human society fell when civil society broke down. Ann Talbot said, "For Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct. It was something that existed in large parts of Europe. Hobbes's response to these very real causes of fear was to attempt to construct a scientific and materialist theory of politics that was revolutionary in its implications and was to reverberate through the Enlightenment.

Hutchinson was a different type of thinker than Hobbes. As Chris Dite writes, "Hutchinson diverges from Hobbes. "Disorder" is not some wild state of nature but the corrupt existence of man-made hierarchies. "Order" is their destruction and replacement with something natural, good and just. Think of her order-and-disorder schema as a kind of "socialism or barbarism" for the first revolutionary movement of early capitalism."[1]

Hutchinson, according to Dite, sought to steer a middle course. He writes, "Two disastrous poles emerge in Hutchinson's account. The first is Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees, who successfully vie for a republican oligarchy. Hutchinson is too proudly independent to support their brutal centralisation, and she condemns them as corrupt slaves to their ambition. The second is the Diggers — proto-communists who "endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities." This is no less disturbing to Hutchinson, who viewed private estates — overseen by good-hearted landlords committed to justice for the poor and the mighty — as the model community. So this victorious Hutchinson — so attuned to the power dynamics of revolutionary change — finds herself too "virtuous" to further usher in any new world. As Cromwell's dictatorship fell apart upon his death, the monarchy returned to power in 1660. John was arrested on suspicion of plotting against King Charles II and died in prison."

Despite the woeful lack of media coverage, this is an important book. It rightfully restores Lucy Hutchinson's place amongst the great figures of the 17^th century, such as Hobbes, Harrington, Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

[1] https://jacobin.com/2022/11/lucy-hutchinson-regicide-king-charles-i-memoirs-english-civil-war

Monday, 8 May 2023

Review: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel by David Lester, with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle- £8.99-Verso Publications.

"The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth".

William Howitt: "Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies." London, 1838,

"If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt".

Karl Marx

It should be as given that this graphic novel about the early Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay will resonate with today's struggles against oppression and modern-day wage slavery.

The story of Benjamin Lay's life is long and complex. Still, it is to illustrator Daniel Lester and historians Markus Rediker and Paul Buhle credit that this graphic novel does justice to Lay's life and brings his remarkable story to a wider and younger audience.

Benjamin Lay was born to a Quaker family in Copford, Essex, in the late part of the 17th Century. He was born a dwarf and ran away to sea from an early age. It would not be an overstatement to say that Lay led a diverse life. He worked as a shepherd, glove maker, sailor, and bookseller. His worldview was a complex mixture of Quakerism, vegetarianism, animal rights, opposition to the death penalty, and abolitionism. Lay, while being anti-slavery, was not anti-capitalist. He did shun the trappings of wealth that his business acumen brought him. While in America, he lived in a cave with a library of two hundred books. His 12 years at sea were a seminal period for him as he experienced the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade in the West Indies.

Lay saw slavery as an abomination and would dedicate his life to its abolition. His campaign was unorthodox, and his radical movement included what can only be called "guerrilla theatre" against the Quaker capitalist ruling elite who owned slaves. In a Burlington Friends Meeting House in New Jersey, he enacted one of his guerilla actions at a prayer meeting denouncing the slave owners in the room. One of his more famous actions was soaking slave owner Quakers in fake blood. Lay said, "All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage, pretending to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion, commit a notorious sin. Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures." Such was the class hatred of the ruling Quaker elite. Lay was only "reinstated to the fold" in 2017. The Abington Quakers of Pennsylvania recognised him as "a Friend of the Truth". London Quakers followed suit by declaring "unity" with Lay's spirit.

As Sabrina Jones points out, "Arriving in Philadelphia, the Lays were dismayed to find the "City of Brotherly Love" was also rife with the buying and selling of "fellow creatures" by members of their faith community. For his dogged denunciation of Quaker slaveholders, Lay was thrown out of four Quaker meetings, including Abington Friends, near Philadelphia, where he eventually settled in a cave with Sarah and his library of hundreds of books. Though largely self-taught, Lay wrote a fierce polemic of a book. All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates was printed by Benjamin Franklin, who discretely left his name off it to avoid offending his Quaker clients. It was published without the approval of the Quaker leaders, who bought ads in the newspaper to disavow the book and its author."[1]

As Markus Rediker states in his book Lay despite heavily influencing 19th-century U.S. abolitionists, was lost to history. You might say Rediker rescued Lay from the condescension of history. For most of his life, Lay led almost a single-handed campaign against the Quaker elite, who made handsome profits from slavery. His initial campaign took place in America. In Prophet Against Slavery, Rediker explains the importance of Lay. "David Lester, Paul Buhle and I created this graphic novel to recover his inspiring life for our tumultuous times," He was a revolutionary, attacking rich men who "poison the earth for gain". He believed that human beings and animals were "fellow creatures" within the natural world.

Honestly, I have never been a great fan of graphic novels, but artist David Lester's book, while not an easy read, turns out to be a stunning visual experience. He keeps his storyline simple and lets his drawings give the reader a deeper insight. This graphic novel is adapted from the superb biography The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker. Rediker did an essay for this book.

As Rediker highlights in his book Lay's significance was that he was one of the first radicals to call an end to all slavery in whatever form it took. He refused to consume anything produced by slave labour. Lay was opposed by a significant section of Quakers, who had grown fat on slavery. As Rediker points out, these Quakers played a massive part in the bloody rise of American capitalism. The New England Puritans and Quakers became some of America's most significant industrial leaders.

As Karl Marx wrote, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.[2]

Although only touched upon in Lester's book is Lay's acknowledgement of the importance of the English Revolution to his struggle against slavery. Lay had a deep connection to the radicals of the English Revolution. Rediker said, "I've identified five major influences, and the first and the most important of these was a specifically radical variant of Quakerism. Now Quakerism goes back, actually, to the English Revolution. It began as one of many radical Protestant groups.

The others were the Levellers, the Diggers, the Seekers, and the Ranters. The Quakers are all part of this. Those groups arose during the English Revolution when royal censorship broke down as the king, King Charles I, and Royalists did battle with Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary side. These radical groups burst into print in that situation, offering from below their solutions to the day's problems. Quakers were part of this, and there was a man named James Naylor, who was an especially radical Quaker. I basically argued in my book that Benjamin Lay channelled this early generation of Quakers. They were very activist. They performed at street theatre. They were very confrontational. He managed a couple of generations later to reach back to them in order to revive that spirit of Quakerism."

It would appear that Benjamin Lay is many things to many people. Lester writes, "I think of this book as being an activist book. It's meant to propel activism, and Benjamin Lay's story is pointing activists to the importance of having a long-term view of social revolution. For Lay to do what he did for 27 years dedicatedly is inspiring. He had the integrity, fortitude and stamina needed to work in a situation where you might not live to see the results of your activism. In some cases, revolutions occur overnight. But we know that revolutions can backslide and can be full of problematic areas. So, you must be in for the long haul and know it's a long, messy road to social progress."

I can understand why Lay is attractive to elements within the Psuedo Left. Despite his seemingly revolutionary activism, Lay was no anti-capitalist, let alone an early Marxist. However, Lay's life and struggle contain lessons for today's workers in struggle and is an important introduction to students in schools and colleges and the wider public.

Notes

The return of Benjamin Lay-by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker-Tuesday, 13 June – Saturday, 8 July 2023-Finborough Theatre-https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-return-of-benjamin-lay/

[1] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/from-slaveowners-to-abolitionists/

[2] Karl Marx. Capital Volume One-Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

Monday, 1 May 2023

The Revolutionary Politics of Angela Davis-Naima Omar.Bookmarks Publication-£3.00-2020

This pamphlet is based on a series of articles written by Naima Omar. It includes a speech by Angela Davis after her release from prison in 1972 and an interview from June 2020 on the Black Lives Matter uprising. From a political standpoint, the Socialist Workers Party member Omar largely whitewashes the reactionary Stalinist politics of Angela Davis.

Davis was a political activist and writer from an early age, joining the Communist Party USA when she was fifteen. Her writings ranged from the struggle against racism and for prison abolition, for women's liberation to campaigning against imperialist war, and in support of Palestinian rights.

According to an article by Helen Halyard “ Davis has joined with other academics, such as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to promote the theory that blacks in America remain the victims of a caste system epitomized by the disproportionate number of African Americans in the US prison system. Davis and a section of the pseudo-left have latched on to the massive growth of America's prisons as a rationale for promoting racial politics to divert attention away from the more fundamental class issues. While referring to the capitalist economic system, Davis described the prisons largely in racial terms, at one point saying, "it was a way to manage black bodies in the aftermath of slavery."[1]

Her most famous work was: Women, Race, and Class, published in 1981. While useful from the standpoint of a historical study of female oppression, its heavy concentration on race over class stemmed from her philosophical outlook. Davis's central premise is that race, not class, is the fundamental division in American society.

From an early age, she was influenced by philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a leading representative of the Frankfurt School. After fleeing the Nazis, Marcuse came to the United States, where he became a university professor and wrote several books, including One Dimensional Man, that influenced the 1960s student movement. Marcuse, as is well known, worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II.

Marcuse's anti-working-class politics led him to believe a "proto-fascist syndrome in the working class" existed. He thought the "revolution" would not be made by the working class but by the young intelligentsia, small fringe groups or guerrilla movements. Its driving force was not the class contradictions of capitalist society but critical thinking and the actions of an enlightened elite. Davis's promotion of racial politics has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Her racial politics are the product of a strain of anti-Marxist thought going back decades, including postmodernism and neo-anarchism.

Suffice it to say the SWP mentions nothing of her reactionary political evolution. The pamphlet presents her as a radical activist still on the side of the oppressed. While mistakenly still seen as a figure of the left, she smoothly transitioned from left icon to "left" academia, securing a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has recently retired.

[1] At University of Michigan symposium Angela Davis offers political cover for Obama- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/31/adav-j31.html

Sunday, 30 April 2023

Blue-eyed Child of Fortune: Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw: Russell Duncan-Paperback – Illustrated, November 30 1999

"Any negro taken in arms against the Confederacy will immediately be returned to a state of slavery. Any negro taken in Federal uniform will be summarily put to death. Any white officer taken in command of negro troops shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection and shall likewise be put to death."

Proclamation by the Confederate President

"Fondly do we hope—and fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman'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

"There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. On horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune."

William James

"We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written."

Robert Gould Shaw

Like most people, I came to learn about the life of Robert Gould Shaw through the excellent film Glory.[1] The movie provides the viewer with a good introduction to the life of Robert Gould Shaw. It is the first feature film to show the role of black soldiers in the American Civil War. It has a degree of accuracy and historical worth that many other history-based films lack. It portrays black soldiers as courageous, along with their white officers.

Thanks to films like "Glory," people are becoming far more aware of the role played by black soldiers in the American Civil War. Close to 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army, and black soldiers fought bravely and knew what they were fighting for. Blue-eyed Child of Fortune: Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw is valuable in understanding why men fought and what ideals animated their actions.

In the introduction to the book, Duncan describes Shaw's letters as showing "the change wrought by battlefield casualties, camp life, commitment, and homesickness upon the sensibilities of youth. His soldiering experience was as common as it was distinctive. His prose is often eloquent, always articulate, intensely informative, amusing, heart-wrenching, and provocative more than a century after he described himself in letters to his family and friends. As interlopers to words never meant for us to ponder, we can enjoy him and gain insight into his times and ours."

During his military career, Shaw was a prolific letter writer. The letters in this book are intimate and give a deep insight into Shaw's thinking. Writing to his mother, Shaw laments, "It is very hard to go off without bidding you goodbye, and the only thing that upsets me, in the least, is the thought of how you will feel when you find me so unexpectedly gone. But I know, dearest Mother, that you wouldn't have me stay when it is so clearly my duty to go.… We all feel that if we can get into Washington before Virginia begins to make trouble, we shall not have much fighting…May God bless you all. When we are all at home together again, may peace & happiness be restored to the Country. The war has already done us good in making the North so united.”[2]

He wrote over two hundred letters, and they revealed a deeply divided and complex man. Despite being the pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was not a complete abolitionist at the beginning of the war. However, he later wrote, "We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written." Despite this sentiment, Shaw never fully reconciled his prejudices about black inferiority. Still, he respected his soldiers' spirit and fighting ability, and as the war proceeded, he stated, "There is not the least doubt that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched."

As Duncan writes, “One of the great pleasures of reading a collection of letters such as this is to witness the writer's development through a telescoping of time and events. The callow Rob Shaw who goes off to war is far different from the bloodied Colonel Robert Shaw, who prepares to lead his men into a desperate and doomed attack on Fort Wagner. The reader's foreknowledge that all of Shaw's choices and chances over three years will ultimately converge into this final massacre lends a true poignancy, but also a real irony, to the letters. For example, his life is saved in May 1862, when a bullet hits his pocket watch; later, he is hit in the neck by a bullet that already has passed through another soldier and fails to penetrate his own body.”[3]

In the same article, Duncan writes about the paradox of Shaw, saying, “ These letters challenge modern sensibility in a number of ways. Shaw was a true patriot, but he also was a victim of his—and his family's—patriotism. He never totally shared their abolitionist beliefs, and his attitude toward the black race could be as condescending as his initial feelings toward Southerners. When Sarah Shaw first published his letters, she removed the more offensive of her son's remarks on black people. Duncan, to his credit, has restored these lines and honestly examines Shaw's sometimes contradictory thoughts on the question of race. When offered the command of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, Shaw, who was not the first choice, turned it down, preferring to stay with his friends and fellow soldiers in Second Massachusetts. He wrote his fiancée, Annie Haggerty, "If I had taken it, it would only have been from a sense of duty; for it would have been anything but an agreeable task.… I am afraid Mother will think I am shirking my duty, but I had some good practical reasons for it." Within days, however, he had changed his mind.[4]

The war radicalised Shaw. His visit to the place where the radical preacher John Brown[5] fought his battles against slavery is significant. So too, was his meeting with Abraham Lincoln. He campaigned for his soldiers to have equal pay, as depicted in the film Glory. It is hard not to believe that Shaw would have been greatly inspired by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, correctly described as 'the greatest social and political revolution of the age.' The greatest authority on revolutions, Karl Marx, said 'Never has such a gigantic transformation taken place so rapidly.'"

While books such as Duncan’s are important in the sense they reestablish the role of black soldiers in their emancipation but is also important to place the struggle against slavery in the wider social and political context. This was done in an essay by the distinguished historian James M Macpherson who wrote, “If we were to go out on the streets of almost any town in America and ask the question posed by the title of this essay, probably nine out of ten respondents would answer unhesitatingly, “Lincoln.” In recent years, though, this answer has been challenged as another example of elitist history, focusing only on the actions of great white males and ignoring the actions of the overwhelming majority of the people who also make history. If we were to ask our question of professional historians, the reply would be quite different. They would speak of ambivalence, ambiguity, nuances, paradox, and irony. They would point to Lincoln's gradualism, his slow and apparently reluctant decision for emancipation, his revocation of emancipation orders by Generals John C. Frémont and David Hunter, his exemption of border states and parts of the Confederacy from the Emancipation Proclamation, his statements seemingly endorsing white supremacy. They would say that the whole issue is more complex than it appears—in other words, many historians, as is their wont, would not give a straight answer to the question”.[6]

The serious historian plays an objectively significant role in social life as the embodiment of historical memory. One has to congratulate the historian Russell Duncan for this impressive job of bringing together the letters of Robert Gould Shaw for the wider general public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(1989_film)

[2] North Shore S.I. [Staten Island]Thursday, April 18, 1861

[3] Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune- https://www.enotes.com/topics/blue-eyed-child-fortune

[4] Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune- https://www.enotes.com/topics/blue-eyed-child-fortune

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

[6] James McPherson,

“Who Freed the Slaves?” (1997

Tuesday, 18 April 2023

CWU Bureaucrats attack the SEP's Postal Workers Rank and File Committee

The formation of the postal workers' rank and file committee marks a qualitative turning point in the relationship between the UK Socialist Equality Party(SEP) and rank-and-file postal workers.

This is publically recognised by even the most boneheaded and reactionary CWU bureaucrat. The right-wing attack on the World Socialist Website(see article Communication Workers Union attack on WSWS and UK Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee backfires) is a backhanded compliment. It acknowledges that the CWU leadership has a viable and resolute opposition to its current betrayal of postal workers' struggle.

Postal workers are fed up with the open betrayal of the CWU bureaucracy and are looking for alternatives, as a recent WSWS article pointed out. It quotes one worker: "Is it time we started looking at alternatives?"

This threw the CWU into a frenzy. Its media attacked the World Socialist Web Site and the newly formed Postal Workers Rank and File Committee. The CWU said, "That website is ran by absolute cranks that have zero interest in the welfare of postal workers (or any other workers). Stick with the union. It's your voice. Solidarity."

As Robert Stevens replied for the WSWS, "This piece of red-baiting would not have been out of place in right-wing Tory rags such as the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph. The CWU is attacking not only socialist opposition to its betrayals but the many CWU members who have written to the WSWS over the last month. The WSWS's interest in the welfare of postal workers" is clear over eight articles, from March 16-26, containing over 10,500 words directly from posties. In their comments, they explain in detail the atrocious situation they face, with many denouncing the CWU leadership for allowing such backbreaking conditions and the unachievable targets set by Royal Mail. The slander on the WSWS and Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee backfired on the CWU, with tens of thousands of postal workers reading the Twitter threads, with most comments posted pulling no punches in denouncing the CWU apparatus."[1]

The WSWS does not need to apologise over its stance, and its "interest in the welfare of postal workers" is clear over eight articles, from March 16-26, containing over 10,500 words directly from postal workers.

Postal workers, send a message to rmpw.rfc@gmail.com to contact and join the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee.

[1] Communication Workers Union attack on WSWS and UK Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee backfires-Robert Stevens- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/17/ktme-a17.html

Thursday, 13 April 2023

Postal Workers at UK’s Royal Mail establish a rank-and-file committee

The decision by postal workers, with the support of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to found a rank-and-file committee is, by any stretch of the imagination, a truly historical event.

It is a welcome development despite taking 36 years (the anniversary of my last set to with the CWU bureaucracy). It now offers postal workers a way to fight against the CWU Bureaucracy without one hand tied behind their backs.

I urge all postal workers to join it and prevent what will be a huge betrayal by the current CWU leadership. As was said in an article posted on the World Socialist Website, “The committee will aim to mobilise workers against Royal Mail’s attacks and lead a fight for an inflation-busting pay rise, a defence of terms and conditions, an end to all job cuts and the overturning of victimisations.”

The betrayal being organised by the CWU bureaucracy marks a new stage in its development into an arm of corporate management. How long before Messrs Furey and Ward become members of the board? Their betrayal is not down to being bad people or weak this is the nature of the trade union bureaucracy worldwide.

Workers are trapped inside “trade union” organisations, which have assumed the character of corporatist entities controlled by petty-bourgeois functionaries like (Ward and Furey) whose own interests are in no way connected to even a residual defence of the rank and file’s share of the national income. The union leadership and apparatus act as an industrial police force for Royal Mail management.

The article Growing support for UK Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee, states “The formation of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee shows that Royal Mail workers can break out of the confines of the CWU’s pro-company agenda and mount a direct challenge to the profits diktats of the company. It is an example others must follow. As the Committee’s founding resolution states, “Millions of workers in the UK are waging the same fight in a strike wave ongoing since last summer. This is part of an international struggle against global corporations and governments seeking to impose the immense cost of pandemic corporate bailouts and rampant inflation on the working class.”

Email rmpw.rfc@gmail.com to contact and join the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee.

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

Becoming Frida Kahlo March 10- BBC2 and BBC iPlayer

"Most of my friends grew up slowly. I grew up in an instant,"

Frida Kahlo

"A ribbon around a bomb."

Andre Breton on Kahlo's art

"I have suffered two big accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me. The other was Diego,"

Frida Kahlo

"Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a little closer, and you will see clearly enough gashes and spots made by vandals: Catholics and other reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You have before you not simply a 'painting,' an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle. And it is at the same time a masterpiece!"

Leon Trotsky

There is a lot to commend in this visually stunning and serious three-part series on the life and politics of Frida Kahlo. I say serious because previous documentaries or books about Kahlo have been pretentious and flippant. The complex nature of Kahlo's life deserves a serious approach. But having said that, there are several serious political weaknesses in the programs.

The first of a three-part series on the legendary Mexican painter, The Making and Breaking, manages to squeeze so much information into one episode that it nearly ruins the next two parts. Despite much being known about Kahlo and her work selling for obscene amounts( (Her 1949 painting Diego Y Yo sold for almost $35m in 2021), the program still manages to inform and enlighten.

There is no single narrator. There are interviews with biographers, art historians from Mexico and the US, and miraculously surviving family members. Kahlo's great-niece Cristina Kahlo and Diego Rivera's grandson.

Like programs two and three, the first program is divided into mini-chapters, each with its heading. "Everything goes wrong" details graphically the bus crash that almost killed Kahlo, causing her terrible injuries and ending her plan of becoming a doctor. She turned to art instead. "Most of my friends grew up slowly. I grew up in an instant." She was helped by her mother, who built her an adapted easel. Her first self-portrait and one of my favourite paintings was the stunning Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress.

She was an exceptional child born in 1907. Kahlo contracted polio in 1912. She later told people she was born in 1910 to ally herself with the new, post-revolution Mexico. She was born at The Blue House in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. Kahlo was a fervent socialist at an early age, and in 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party, where she met Diego Rivera.

Rivera supported the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Trotskyist Fourth International for some time. You would not have known the latter watching this program. Also, when historical figures such as Tina Modotti are mentioned, they are treated largely superficially. The Italian photographer Tina Modotti was a fellow radical along with Kahlo. Her lover was the notorious GPU assassin Vittorio Vidali, alias Carlos Contreras. Another lover was the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. Both had connections to Stalinism, and their murderous gangsterism was never mentioned. The BBC film ignores that Siqueiros played a central role in the unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life in May 1940.

Jesse Olsen points out in his article, "Modotti is an example of how the Mexican and Russian revolutions inspired young artists. However, she is also a tragic example of the many artists who came under the sway of Stalinism and paid a terrible price. Modotti worked for Stalin's KGB (the Soviet secret service) from the mid-1930s and was associated with the Italian Stalinist functionary Vittorio Vidali, who, as early as 1927, had been a Stalinist operative in the Mexican party. Together with the muralist Siqueiros, he tried to murder Trotsky in 1940. Siqueiros, the former communist, and artist—like the Communist Party of Mexico itself—had become part of Stalin's apparatus."[1]

While Kahlo is the program's central figure, her long-time lover and fellow artist Diego Rivera looms large in the films(no pun intended). Their relationship was stormy, but they both understood the beauty and importance of their artistic work. Kahlo described Rivera as "an architect in his paintings, in his thinking process, and in his passionate desire to build a functional, solid and harmonious society... He fights at every moment to overcome mankind's fear and stupidity." Rivera spoke highly and perceptively of Kahlo, saying, "It is not tragedy that rules Frida's work... The darkness of her pain is just a velvet background for the marvellous light of her physical strength, her delicate sensibility, her bright intelligence, and her invincible strength as she struggles to live and show her fellow humans how to resist hostile forces and come out triumphant."

As mentioned in the film Rivera came under sustained attack(primarily from the Stalinists) for taking commissions from American capitalists. The Communist Party smeared Rivera as an "agent of North American imperialism and the millionaire, Morrow".

Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party after receiving several commissions from the government and accepting an assignment from the US ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, to paint a mural in the former Cortéz Palace of Cuernavaca. In 1933 Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural entitled Man at the Crossroads by John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller objected when Rivera added the great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the mural, and Rockefeller had the mural destroyed.[2]

Rivera defended the mural saying the portrait of Lenin was "the only correct painting to be made in the building [as] an exact and concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at present, and an indication of the road that man must follow to liquidate hunger, oppression, disorder and war."

Kahlo and Rivera came around the Trotskyist movement and briefly had a close relationship with Trotsky. In 1938, Rivera collaborated with Trotsky and Andre Breton in writing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art[3] , which called for "a complete and radical reconstruction of society."

For a while Trotsky held Rivera in very high regard, saying, "Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a little closer, and you will see clearly enough gashes and spots made by vandals: Catholics and other reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You have before you not simply a 'painting,' an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle. And it is, at the same time, a masterpiece! In the field of painting, the October Revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico… Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection would never have attained such breadth and profundity."[4]

Despite Trotsky's glowing tribute, he was aware of the political inadequacies of both Kahlo and Rivera. As Joanne Laurier perceptively writes, "It seems safe to suggest that neither Rivera nor Kahlo—remarkable artists and not first and foremost political thinkers—ever understood the essence of Trotsky's struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy, including the theory of permanent revolution, and remained to one extent or another under the influence of Mexican nationalism and that primarily accounts for both of them ending up, chastened and demoralized, in the camp of Stalinism."[5]

While this three-part documentary has much to like and commend, there are some serious political flaws. For instance, trying to cram the last and most important fifteen years of Kahlo's life into 15 minutes is madness and politically unforgivable. There is also a tendency to concentrate on Kahlo's feelings without putting them in a wider political context. That context is the world-historical struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism. The fact that this struggle was at the center of Kahlo's and Rivera's lives is deliberately missing from the film.

The film is too preoccupied with Rivera's infidelities and Kahlo's "bisexuality", which is an adaptation to the current intellectual environment. The #MeToo movement has adopted Kahlo as one of their own. These layers of the so-called intelligentsia have become affluent and have moved far to the right. They ignore Kahlo's revolutionary politics and are hostile to the working class. Despite this, the films are worth seeing.