Liverpool Marxist Book Fair (2020)

Party News from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 23 November the first ever Marxist Book Fair was held in Liverpool, with various denizens of what the press likes to call the ‘ultra-left’ in attendance, by invite only. The venue was a largish back room in a fairly up-scale pub close to the University, and members of our Lancaster and Manchester branches turned up in the morning to crew a stall for the day. We were rather lucky to be given a large table in a good position in front of the band stage, which meant we were able to mount an SPGB banner on two speaker stands on the stage behind us. This formed an impressive backdrop to our display of literature, t-shirts, badges, and a laptop running the Party whiteboard video on permanent loop. Pretty groovy, we thought, except that the banner rather dominated the room while other stall displays were somewhat more modest, contrary to our expectations. What we also didn’t realise was that when the scheduled talks began, people would be using the stage area, so every speaker had to deliver their talk in front of our SPGB banner. Oops, our bad. It looked uncomfortably like something the SWP would do. They are notorious for trying to hijack events, which may have been why they hadn’t been invited.

There was a curiously eclectic mix of groups there, including the Merseyside Socialist Theory Study Group, Socialist Appeal, the CPGB, Liverpool’s ‘News from Nowhere’ radical bookshop, the CWO, and ex-Militant (nowadays calling themselves Socialist Party of England and Wales – SPEW – with a kind of self-hating disregard for the power of acronyms). We had a nice long chat with the people on the IWW stall next to us. We couldn’t really figure out the logic by which some groups were invited or not invited, but anyway it was a pleasant day and everyone was very civil and polite, which makes a nice change considering how left groups have been known to treat each other in the past.

The talks said much about the politics of the groups involved. Instead of giving a lecture we chose a bit of audience participation, and we were grilled on our parliamentary politics (left communists, like anarchists, tend to be very against using parliament as part of the revolutionary process, while the IWW – aka Wobblies – are syndicalists who are also sceptical). Quite why this is such a big issue for left groups is a bit of a mystery to us. Our Material World column this month (page 9), writing on Hong Kong, makes a very good point about whether or not people in revolutionary situations would use the ballot box – just you try and stop them!

Some of the other speakers talked in impassioned tones about the urgent need to ‘get the Tories out’. We’ve been hearing this same rallying cry for decades and it’s amazing that such groups have got the energy to keep banging that drum. Leaving aside the politics of favouring one capitalist party over another, there’s something hugely dispiriting about such calls. It’s bad enough when you can’t get workers to consider the idea of taking the whole world into common ownership, without governments, frontiers, the rich, money, banks or bosses. But at least that’s an ambitious goal. How much worse must it be when you can’t get recruits for your group when the only thing you are asking them to agree with is ‘get the Tories out?’

One or two other speakers talked about the need for socialist ‘leadership’, which made us feel slightly uncomfortable and reminded us we were in the presence of a lot of Leninists. The thing about people on the left who believe in this is that they’re not necessarily in love with the idea of having bosses and having to take orders, it’s just that they can’t imagine a group getting anywhere without leadership. The fact that we have no leaders and are also the second oldest political party in Britain may prove that it is possible to have a sustainable and long-lived leaderless group, but that’s not the point as far as they’re concerned. What is the point is that we haven’t achieved our aim of world socialist revolution, so in their minds this proves that leaderless groups don’t get anywhere. But in a classic case of confirmation bias, they tend to overlook the fact that they haven’t got anywhere either! As we pointed out in our contribution to the gathering, we’re all in the same back room of an obscure Liverpool boozer, not hosting rallies in football stadiums.

The only group which chose not to give a talk was SPEW. In fact they didn’t look like they enjoyed being there at all. They didn’t seem to talk to anyone at other stalls, pointedly carried on conversations between themselves when other people were giving talks, and then packed up abruptly and noisily in the middle of one of the talks. We wondered if they’d been getting bad hex vibes from the other stallholders. We tend to forget that, while we’re not keen on Leninist ideas in general and we do have an enshrined commitment in our Declaration of Principles to be ‘hostile to all other parties’, in practice we’re fairly easy-going and tolerant compared to Leninist groups themselves, who frequently hate each other with a vengeance.

There were a fair number of visitors, and quite a good crowd for the talks, considering that advertising for the event had probably been modest (there was no poster on the railings outside the pub, which seemed like an unfortunate oversight, or it may have been a pub prohibition). We sold a bit of stuff and made a few contacts. The general idea is to hold this Book Fair every November, and we’ll be happy to go along again if asked. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years, and whether groups who are historically so divided over their revolutionary approaches will remain enthusiastic about the idea of sharing an annual space, especially if the SWP get involved. Dislike of the SWP is probably the only thing all left groups have in common.

How to keep the event sustainable in the long term is a particularly relevant question given what’s happened lately to the long-established London Anarchist Book Fair, which seems to have (perhaps temporarily) died a death. This event managed quite successfully for the most part and over many years to accommodate a variety of perspectives within the general anarchist movement. But then a catastrophic Trans-Terf confrontation in 2017 caused it to go into melt-down. The organisers, facing a barrage of unjust criticism and abuse (being called ‘fascists’, etc), understandably lost the will to organise a further event so there hasn’t been one since, although some regional bookfairs have gone ahead. Let’s hope the organisers of the Marxist event don’t end up in a similar situation. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished . . .

Paddy Shannon

Life Before and After Capitalism (2013)

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

There were at least 200 people packed in a lecture theatre at last year’s Anarchist Book Fair on 27  October to listen to anthropologists Chris Knight and David Graeber discuss ‘Life Without Capitalism’.

Knight’s anthropological work is inspired by a statement by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that ‘the overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex’ and that this led to the end of primitive communism and the rise of class society and patriarchy.

Knight opened by stressing that we need to break out of the fictitious bubble of ideology which contains capitalism, bourgeois society, and the nuclear family. He argued that we should look to the primitive communism of hunter-gatherer societies. He referred to the Hadza people in Tanzania and the Mbendjele pygmies in the Congo who lived in egalitarian systems of social relationships and also mentioned that the Mbendjele people experiment with ‘pendulum of power’ relationships which swing between women rule and male rule.

Knight spoke of ‘the human revolution’ that took place 100,000 years ago at the dawn of human society when there was a huge social, sexual and political revolution that brought about the primitive communist society of the hunter-gatherers. Knight believes this ‘human revolution’ can occur again.

Knight later discussed ‘Lunate’: the importance of the Moon in hunter-gatherer society, the menstrual cycle of 29.5 days, women’s power in the primitive communism of hunter-gather society, and the need for horizontal decision-making and organisation in society, and the desirability of ’pendulum of power’ relationships in a future anarchist communist society.

He concluded that we need to empower ourselves to take power, to slow time, manage the playful in the revolutionary process, build on the work achieved by the Occupy Movement, and that we need to set a future date for global insurrection, for example 2017, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

David Graeber spoke of more recent history than Knight. He spoke of the Neolithic period of 5,000 years ago and the origin of money in violence, terror, the state, it arising out of a legal system to remedy violence, and as payment to standing armies (see August Socialist Standard on Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years).

Graeber also spoke about the early cities in Mesopotamia which he said were obsessed with equality, the paradox of commercial activity taking place in an equalitarian society, and that inequality was a reaction against standardisation. He referred to the rise of slavery, the enslavement of women, and the equivalences of the monetary system based on female fertility.

Graeber observed that the emergence of the state coincides with the appearance of beer. He is an Anarchist and was active in the Occupy Movement. He is also the author of the 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years while Knight is author of the 1991 book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture.

Steve Clayton

Brocialism and Manarchism (2013)

From the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late October saw a few incidents which ‘feminists’ criticised. The Anarchist Bookfair in London saw a transwoman abused and an outdoor Catholic (not a religion known for being pro-women) called Ciaran O’Reilly heckled by ‘feminists’ (Sam Ambreen) shouting “kill all men”. At a meeting about Wikileaks in Liverpool, the same speaker was apparently harassed on account of rape apologism in respect of allegations against Julian Assange. Meanwhile Laurie Penny criticised Russell Brand (2 Nov 2013) for sexism after he wrote his views on revolution in the New Statesman.

The issue of feminism raises many questions. Do women bear the brunt of sexism? Generally, yes. Are women more likely to be victims of rape and domestic violence? Yes. Are allegations made by women less likely to even be investigated when reporting rape? Yes. Some have been surprised to find attitudes of sexism from ‘socialists’ and in the labour movement, (see Women in the Labour Movement statement) and even negative attitudes to disability (see LINK).

Feminists have characterised these problems as ones dismissed by socialists or relegated to the future, accusing sexist men of ‘brocialism’ (a portmanteau of brother and socialism) or manarchism (man and anarchism), but they must be speaking to the wrong so-called ‘socialists’. These observations are not ones dismissed by genuine socialists, as these problems have solutions that genuine socialists want and act to implement now. ‘Socialists’  perpetuating sexism only expose themselves as non-socialists. ‘Intersectionality’ is a modern term for different forms of oppression intersecting – for example, sexism intersecting with class society – but these types of concepts and connections were observations writers like Engels made way back in the nineteenth century.

Our socialism is in a sense  ‘feminist’ (although a better term would be egalitarian) as it is the socialism of the pioneering anti-sexist works of Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Eleanor Marx.

Venezuela and Chile (2006)

Film Review from the forthcoming October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Video by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. 74 minutes. Available from Power Pictures - Screen Scene, 41 Upper Mount St, Dublin 2. http://www.chavezthefilm.com

In 1992 Hugo Chavez, a junior parachute officer, tried to seize power in Venezuela in a traditional South American coup. He failed and spent some time in jail. He then tried another way and in 1998 was elected President, with 56 percent of the votes cast; he was re-elected in 2000 with a 60 percent vote. In elections held to a constituent assembly in 1999 his supporters obtained 120 of the 131 seats.

Chavez is a populist nationalist and radical reformist not a socialist, but his programme of radical reforms and moving from private capitalism towards state capitalism threatened the vested interests of powerful private capitalist groups. According to anarchist and anti-parliamentarist theory, which says that even if power can be won via the ballot box for radical change it can't be retained, what should have happened next was that the powerful groups whose interests were threatened should stage a coup and unleash a bloody repression. As, for instance, in Chile in September 1973:

"Socialism cannot come through the Parliament. If we look at a country like Chile we can see why. In 1973 the people elected a moderate socialist government led by President Allende. This democratically-elected government was toppled by a CIA backed military coup. Repression followed in which the workers movement was smashed and thousands of militants lost their lives". (From "What is Anarchism?")

(This statement is both factually wrong and logically flawed. Allende became president in 1970 and so was not immediately overthrown as is suggested. And if he was a "moderate socialist", i.e. a mere reformist like the Labour and Social Democratic parties of Europe and Australasia, there have been plenty of other such governments, which have not been toppled in a coup; in fact, most haven't. Having said this, socialism cannot come through electing such governments but for quite other reasons than that they come to power through elections.)

On 11 April 2002, true to anarchist theory, a group of top Venezuelan army officers and business leaders did stage a coup. Chavez was arrested and taken to a secret destination where he was put under pressure to resign (he refused). It so happened that an Irish film crew, which had come to make a documentary about Chavez and Venezuela, was actually in the presidential palace at the time. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a fascinating and instructive record of how events unfolded over the next few days (together with material from the originally-planned film and lots of Spanish with sub-titles): the dejected ministers, the installation of the usurper president, the recapture of the palace by the presidential guard, the arrest of some of the plotters, the pro-Chavez street demonstrations and the return of Chavez two days later. He is still there.

So the coup failed. It failed because those who had voted for Chavez were prepared to take to the streets to back up their vote and because the bulk of the armed forces remained loyal to the constitution and the constitutionally-elected president. The anarchist theory that power obtained by the ballot box to effect radical changes can't be retained was disproved by experience.

What happened confirms rather our view that a socialist majority can both win and retain power via the ballot box if that majority is sufficiently organised and determined and if there is no question as to their democratic legitimacy. If pro-capitalist elements were to stage a coup after a socialist election victory it could prove to be even more short-lived than in Venezuela in April 2002. The slogan that anarchists and other chant on demonstrations that "the people united can never be defeated" is actually true, to back up an electoral victory too.

The film is being shown at the Anarchist Bookfair in London this month*. It will be interesting to see how they will explain away the events it records. Perhaps they'll change the text of their leaflet to:

"Socialism may be able to come through the Parliament. If we look at a country like Venezuela we cannot see why not. In 1998 and 2000 the people elected a radical reformist government led by President Chavez. An attempt was made in 2002 to topple this democratically elected government but it failed because the government enjoyed majority popular support and the loyalty of the armed forces".

Adam Buick

*Correction:
The film was actually shown at the 2005 Anarchist Bookfair. The general point being made still stands, though.

Further Reading:
Hugo Chavez: revolutionary socialist or left-wing reformist?