Colour barred (1993)

Book Review from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Never Counted Out! By Michael Herbert. (Dropped Aitches Press. Manchester. 1992. £4.95.)

This book recounts the boxing career and political activity of Len Johnson, one of the best middleweights of the 1920s. Despite meeting, and sometimes beating, some of the best boxers in the world Johnson was not allowed to compete for British or Commonwealth titles because of an official ban on “coloured" boxers.

As Herbert points out:

 The need to maintain the myth of European superiority in social as well as political life becomes apparent. A contest between black and white in the boxing ring could too easily become a metaphor for the stability of the Empire should white boxers be regularly defeated.

As part of the small black community which had settled in Manchester after the opening of the Ship Canal in 1894, Johnson, born of an African father and an Irish Mancunian mother in 1902, faced hardship and racial discrimination.

He experienced boxing at its toughest—training in the back yard with a skipping rope made from a piece of clothesline—and earning only £1 from his first professional fight.

In a professional career which spanned twelve years— from 1921 to 1933—Johnson had 127 contests, of which he won 92. lost 29 and drew 6. But despite his prowess in the ring he was only able to make a living wage from the sport and financial difficulties forced him to make a come-back in 1931 despite suffering from rheumatism in both elbows.

Towards the end of the second world war Johnson joined the Communist Party and this marked the start of his political activity. He was a founder member and secretary of the New International Society which was formed in Moss Side, Manchester in 1946. The society’s fight against racial segregation abroad and discrimination at home soon led to the Communist Party trying to control it. A policy document dated 2 December 1948 states:

 Apart from the Society, there is no effective means of winning the support or neutralising colonial individuals or groups which, for a variety of reasons, do not join the Party.

In the 1950s, Johnson campaigned energetically on behalf of the singer Paul Robeson who had had his passport withdrawn for Communist activities in the USA. He also stood as a Communist Party candidate in Manchester local elections on six occasions, his small vote dwindling each time as Cold War conditions hardened.

In 1962 Johnson seems to have dropped out of political activity completely, possibly due to ill health because he remained a Communist Party member until his death in 1974.

This account of the machinations of the Communist Party in trying to manipulate and control groups which could serve its interests, combined with meticulous research to discover the boxing career of one of the sports forgotten heroes makes fascinating reading, but it needs to be stated that it is the barbarity of capitalism's economic system which forces workers to risk injury to earn a living. It was also a complete waste of Johnson's considerable abilities and energy to campaign for a politically dishonest organization such as the Communist Party and its now discredited state-capitalist policies.

Carl Pinel

Jack Dash (1989)

From the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I last saw Jack Dash he lay dying in an East End hospital; he said he knew that his time had come, but hoped that he had contributed his bit to the struggle of his class. The time before that we sat in a pub and argued with the ferocity that good friendship allows. Although we were separated in age by half of a century, and in ideas by an even greater gulf, Jack and I were real mates. He was a marvellous story-teller, and able poet who could recite with passion and sing old cockney songs in ways that brought their class origins to life. When, a few years ago, a discussion circle on Marxism was set up in Jack's flat it was a pleasure to see how willing he was to think afresh about the complexities of Marxist theory: in all his years of being praised and vilified as a "Marxist" he had found little time to delve into the complexities of the history of our class, and it was tremendous to share in the process of such discovery when giving talks to Jack and his friends at those informal classes held on the eighteenth floor of a tower block.

Three passions governed Jack's political life. He was a member of the Communist Party. A real loyalist: not a word would he hear against the Socialist Fatherland which dominated his political vision like Jesus on the Cross in the mind of a God Squad zealot. Secondly, he was a militant trade unionist. Never an official man, Jack. The T & G tried to offer him official posts, but Jack preferred to stick to the rank and file. "You win strikes with the men, not sitting in a union office making plans for them", he would say. He knew the docks as if they were his home and the dockers as if they were family: to sell them out would be like stabbing a relative in the back. He said of the TUC that "there are more knights around the table than there were at King Arthur's. If I'd had my way they wouldn't be knighted but neutered". Thirdly, he loved the arts: poetry (Shelley was his favourite, but he liked plenty of others, including the required "Soviet: writers) and paintings and songs and plays. When Unity Theatre (the first working-class theatre in London to put on radical plays) were being built he volunteered as a labourer. His partner on the site was Paul Robeson who stayed with Jack while he was in London; Jack would complain about Robeson hogging the bathroom in the morning and singing at the top of his voice. Imagine that: months of having one of the finest singers ever to live annoying  you with his unpaid entertaining as you prepare for a hard day's work in the docks.

Uncritical of Russia
Capitalism is a monstrous system which makes fools of worker's ideals. As a socialist, the present writer was hostile to Jack's Leninist politics. Without a doubt, he wanted a better world to love in. When the present writer described the socialism that we so urgently need to establish, Jack would be filled with enthusiasm. His hatred of the profit system and hunger for something new are not to be sneered at. But for all of that he was an unrepentant Stalinist. Not a word of criticism would he ever voice against the atrocities committed by the state-capitalist police state which exists in the Russian Empire. He would lose no time in apologising for it. When Stalin was purging millions of so-called enemies of "socialism in one country", Brother Dash was there to explain that most of Stalin's crimes were invented by the capitalist press, and the others were justified by the "counter-revolutionary" activities of Stalin's opponents. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Brother Dash pointed out that Stalin had gone too far, but now the socialist state was in safe hands. All of the obscene corruption of the Brezhnev years was defended without the merest hint of criticism. When the so-called Eurocommunists began to express complaints about all not being perfect in the Russian proletarian paradise, Brother Dash denounced them as anti-Marxists—or, to use the crazy terminology of the mixed-up "Communists", enemies of "Marxism-Leninism". When Gorbachev introduced the latest reforms, in an effort to integrate the Russian Empire more fully into the capitalist world market, Brother Dash agreed that this is what had to be done in order to modernise socialism. It was one long lifetime of having to pretend that black was white: that oppression was freedom and state capitalism was socialism. It was a life of having to close one's eyes to the Russian bureaucrats whose privileged lifestyles compare well with the fatcat profit-takers who are the capitalists in the West. The poverty of so many East European wage slaves was something to be denied, just as a Tory denies the same social features in Britain.

Why do men who are filled with a burning hatred of the inequities of the profit system allow themselves to be dragged down into this web of self-deceit—and then, inevitably, the deceit of others? Why do they blind themselves, these Stalinist dogmatists who refuse to admit that the whole Bolshevik project has been the most awful disaster for the workers who have been its victims? Here we enter the field of political psychology; it is a field which socialists may have to tread upon a few more times before we complete the road between here and human liberation. One factor in it is the sectarian need to stick to the Party line. The CP says that Russia is the Socialist Fatherland and it is the duty of every loyal comrade to prove that true. When loyalty to the organisation—any organisation—overcomes commitment to historical truth (to honesty), then all is lost in a terrible sectarian haze. Perhaps another motive was the desire on the part of some workers to be able to imagine that an alternative to capitalism was actually in existence. A sort of self-delusion to offer comfort to those who have to live under and suffer the miseries of capitalism. Bogus socialist countries might serve to soften the hardship of living in a world which is really dominated from top to bottom by the capitalist system.

Whatever the motives for the irrational faith in the phoney socialism of the Leninist states, socialists must expose the dangers of such beliefs. Fortunately, history is doing our job for us: these days it is mainly the old-timers who still entertain the crass fantasies about socialist countries existing (although there are plenty of younger leftists who are gullible enough to accept variations on the same old Leninist theme). Sadly for Jack, after years of loyalty to the CP, he was forced to leave it shortly before he died. There has been a very recent split between the Communist Party of Great Britain (which is the Marxism Today official CP) and the Communist Party of Britain which remains loyal to The Morning Star and its uncritical stance towards Russia. (There is yet another CP—the New Communist Party—which argues that even The Morning Star is not Stalinist enough and only they are the true inheritors of the truly fascistic outlook of the heyday of the 1930s.) Jack could  not bring himself to talk about the split which was accompanying the collapse of the CP; he just went on as of nothing has changed, pretending that his little faction was the party.

The Dockers' Way Out
As for his loyalty to the dockers, how ironic it was that Jack died a month after the government announced its intention to abolish the Dock Labour scheme. On the day he died hundreds of dockers went out on unofficial strike after the courts had refused to accept the legality of a three-to-one vote (by secret ballot) in favour of striking. What bloody audacity this this: a government passing laws telling the unions that strikes must be preceded by ballots and then sending in the unelected Judges to declare such a ballot illegal because a dockers' strike could damage the national interest! The fact is that the dockers are up against a system which cannot make profits out of them like it used to and so they are being prepared for the economic slaughter. Jack had fought with admirable militancy back in the 1960s when containerisation threatened the wages and conditions of the dockers. But King Capital is mightier than the mightiest defender of the working-class interest. There comes a point at which defence will not do the trick. Only tackling the wages system itself, with its right to exploit for profit, will prevent the dock employers winning. The dock workers, some of whom marched for Enoch Powell in the late 1960s and voted Labour like sheep to the slaughter are not yet in a position to take on the system. That is what they must do. Only by organising to abolish the wages system, with its employment and jobs, and not by the pathetic demands of "Jobs for Life", will the dockers really win.

Steve Coleman

Dave Zirin: What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States.

Book Review from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dave Zirin: What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States.  Haymarket Books, US$15.00.

What a refreshing change to read a book about sport that isn't a vapid (auto)biography of some 'star' or a jingoistic celebration of the triumph of some national team! Zirin accepts that sport can be used to stop workers from worrying about things that really matter, but also sees how the passion invested in sport can turn it into a site of resistance, an arena where some of the dominant ideas of society can be challenged. While this is something of an exaggeration, his book is still well worth a read.

Zirin traces various kinds of resistance within American sports, concentrating to begin with on opposition to racism. Professional baseball was segregated for decades; not until 1946, when Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, did a black American play in a Major League team. Robinson was subjected to horrendous barracking and threats from opposing players and fans, but his ability eventually got him accepted. His criticism of Paul Robeson and his support for the Republican Party show him as a complex individual who was seen by many later black radicals as a 'white man's Negro', but Zirin argues that Robinson's contribution to opposing racism should be respected.

Of course, integrating baseball did not put an end to racism. While still known as Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali went into a Kentucky restaurant with his 1960 Olympic boxing gold medal around his neck and was refused service. Zirin examines Ali's career, from reviled and persecuted athlete to his current status as 'a harmless, helpful icon'. The book's title comes from what Ali yelled at ex-champion Floyd Patterson, who fought him as a 'patriotic duty' (Patterson was a Catholic in contrast to Ali as a Black Muslim). He was drafted into the army, and his response was 'I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong', at a time when there was little opposition to the US war in Vietnam. As with Robinson, Ali became a 'safe', almost establishment figure, but his earlier legacy is the one that many remember.

If Ali's remark about the Vietcong is famous, probably the best-known image of this period is from the 1968 Olympics, when medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists on the rostrum when the US anthem was played. As Zirin notes, they also wore no shoes (to protest against black poverty) and wore beads (to protest against lynching). They were stripped of their medals and sent home. Zirin interviews Carlos, who for some years had problems earning a living (his wife committed suicide in 1977).

Clearly it took some courage for these individuals (and many others less well known) to stand up for their beliefs, especially in the face of the general conformity of American society. The same goes for those who support better treatment for gay and female athletes. Zirin reminds us that people can be bigoted in one way but not another: American footballer Reggie White spoke up against white supremacist groups and worked to help drug addicts and ex-convicts, yet he was appallingly homophobic, equating gays with child molesters.

And what of class? This gets relatively little look-in. Unsurprisingly, most owners of professional clubs are extremely wealthy, including George W Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Professional sport is the tenth largest industry in the US. Aside from a few megabuck-earners, most athletes earn relatively little, and have a shorter life expectancy than average. Baseball players have a strong union, which helped to increase wages and has a reputation for not backing down.

Zirin ends with the reflection that sport could be more cooperative, without the cash incentive and the will to win at all costs, with far less distance between an average person and a star. But, as he says, 'This would require a completely different world.' While his book doesn't elaborate on this alternative, it should at least make you think a bit more about the role of sport under capitalism.

Paul Bennett