Letter: Immigration: one view . . . (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Immigration: one view  . . .

The front over of the Socialist Standard (July) is emblazoned with a definition by Ambrose Bierce: “Immigrant: an unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.”

Presumably, this means the Socialist Standard regards Karl Marx as an “unenlightened person”. He left Germany and spent most of his life living in Britain. Actually, the development of socialist theory was fostered as a result. Con Lehane (an unenlightened Irish immigrant) became the SPGB’s first general secretary. Hans Neumann (an unenlightened German immigrant) arranged the first meeting of the SPGB’s executive committee. Charlie Lestor (an unenlightened Canadian immigrant) was for many years one of the finest orators the SPGB possessed. Does the SPGB condemn Lehane for being an immigrant? Hapless Lehane could not secure employment anywhere. Is the Socialist Standard suggesting that he should have continued looking for work in Ireland rather than coming over to Britain and helping to form the SPGB?

Doubtless the fascists of the National Front go a long way to agreeing with Bierce’s definition: in the opinion of Tyndall and his thugs “immigrants are unenlightened people”. Socialists should have an entirely different approach. Hunger and poverty in the underdeveloped countries is directly as a result of imperialism. Dire necessity forces thousands of people to leave these regions and look for a better life elsewhere. Like British workers, they are victims of exploitation, but of an exploitation of a much more intense kind.

It is vital that socialists strive to build links of solidarity between British and coloured workers. Essentially we have the same class enemy: only through unity can the enemy be overcome. For this reason, the demand must be made for the repeal of the immigration laws, racist legislation which excludes people from this country merely because of the colour of their skins. If, as the Communist Manifesto says, workers have no fatherland, then the barriers created by immigration laws must be swept aside. Workers must be free to leave and enter Britain as they choose.

To be in accord with these sentiments, the definition of Ambrose Bierce requires modification: “An opponent of immigration is an unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.”

Dr. Raymond Challinor 

Whitley Bay

Reply:

The quotation to which you object was used because it disparages nationalism and comments, aptly in our opinion, on the situation of very many migrants. Its tone is ironical, and we ran the risk of someone’s not perceiving that. To spell it out, the word “unenlightened” relates to the remainder of the sentence: a person who thinks one country better than another requires enlightenment in that respect, but not necessarily in others. Marx and the other people you mention were not under that impression. As for racists finding that issue of the Socialist Standard agreeable — see the letter from John Binder below.

However, you appear not to have read the article on immigration inside the cover. Doing so would have dispelled the misunderstanding in the later part of your letter as well as the above one. The article pointed out that “legislation which excludes people from this country merely because of the colour of their skins” is swept aside when that suits capitalism in Britain and elsewhere. This is, precisely, the trap into which reformism leads. Liberal-minded reformers urge, as you do, that a legislative change will benefit the working class; and then find it does the ruling class a good turn instead.

To say Socialists must “strive to build links of solidarity” between white and black workers is a grandiose way of ignoring the important questions. The majority of black workers, like the majority of white, uphold the capitalist system. They include nationalists, Tories, and people who themselves hold strong race-prejudices. If it were suggested that we aim at "links of solidarity” with white people holding such views, that would cause indignation; but you ask us to do so on the grounds, apparently, that colour transcends everything else. We do not accept such a position. The task for Socialists is to spread among all workers and understanding of their class standing and interests, which come first and foremost. This means the rejection of all ideas of race and national superiority. If you are intent on re-wiring the quotation, here is another version: Opponents and advocates of immigration alike are hidebound by the idea of national frontiers which Socialism will abolish.

Editors.

Peter McDouall: Scottish Chartist (2018)

From the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The third and final part of our series of prominent individuals in the Chartist movement.

We are indebted to the late Raymond Challinor for his biography of Peter McDouall but which endeavours to make McDouall out to be yet another in the long run of ‘Scottish Lenins’. 

George Julian Harney was to recall, 'No man in the Chartist movement was better known than Dr McDouall’.  Peter McDouall (M’Douall) was a significant figure in Chartism. Imprisoned twice, dying at a relatively young age, it is not an exaggeration to say that McDouall gave his life for Chartism.

Peter McDouall was born in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, and served as an apprentice to a surgeon in his home town, then studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He subsequently moved to Lancashire, first to a Burnley practice and then to the small cotton town of Ramsbottom. He came to Chartism radicalised by his exposure to the bleak factory conditions in industrial Lancashire and was a campaigner for factory reforms, becoming involved in the ten-hour day agitation. Following the arrest of Joseph Rayner Stephens, McDouall took his place in the forthcoming Chartist convention as a delegate for Ashton under Lyne, a militant Chartist centre with which McDouall was to be closely associated for the rest of his life. In the first convention in 1839, McDouall was a foremost advocate of physical force and, later, of the ‘sacred month’, the Grand National Holiday (or General Strike). He was ‘an advocate for the arming of the people, in defence of their constitutional rights, and although he deprecates the idea of turning any deadly weapon against the lives and property of any portion of the community, he boldly avows that he would take his place with the people to resist any unconstitutional aggression that might be attempted upon their few existing rights and liberties’, according to The Charter portraits of delegates, in 1839.

He also became a staunch advocate of the power of the ordinary worker. He explained:

  ‘The Trades are equal to the middle class in talent, far more powerful in means and much more united in action’ and again ‘The agitation for the Charter has afforded one of the greatest examples in modern history of the real might of the labourers. In the conflict millions have appeared on the stage and the mind of the masses has burst from its shell and begun to flourish and expand.’

In August, he was sentenced at Chester to twelve months’ imprisonment for sedition. On his release in August 1840, McDouall toured the north of England and Scotland and while in Glasgow, he married the daughter of a warder at Chester Castle, where he had served his sentence.

In Scotland, an estimated 200,000 people assembled to hear speeches from White, Collins and McDouall. The huge procession marched on to Glasgow Green and The Scots Times reported ‘the old radical spirit’ had been revived and that ‘Chartism is supreme in Glasgow’.

McDouall spoke at many other meetings around Scotland. The massive demonstrations and expressions of democratic sentiment revealed the existence among working people of a common aim and purpose. The question of what was to be the next step forward was posed with great urgency and on this issue, the Chartists were deeply divided. Supporters of moral force refused to sponsor McDouall’s meetings where he combined an exposition of Chartist principles with a denunciation of the moderates who clamoured for an alliance with the middle class. McDouall, however, no longer believed in making impassioned speeches urging the use of force. Wild revolutionary rhetoric had led to rash actions in England and Wales, with disastrous consequences, which had been largely avoided in Scotland. As he told Edinburgh Chartists:

  ‘We gave our passions the rein; but you have been more cautious, you have suffered less – you gave the reins to reason.’

This did not mean that he had renounced the use of force. What he now appeared to advocate was the possession of weapons for defensive purposes. If the authorities resorted to violence in an attempt to crush Chartism, he thought the moral force men would be the first to desert. McDouall understood the need to avoid riots and premature uprisings which culminated in defeat and demoralisation. For this reason, he was highly critical of the Newport uprising that occurred in November 1839. In a letter from prison, he argues it had been an ‘ill-managed, foolish and quixotic adventure’. Such setbacks interfered with the Chartist Movement which would grow due to ‘The financial disarrangement, the foreign difficulties, the domestic insurrection, will all merge in the end into a grand revolutionary outbreak. No power on earth can prevent it.’

In 1841 and 1842 McDouall played a prominent role in the recently formed National Charter Association and headed the poll for the executive in both years. He also published his own Chartist and Republican Journal in 1841. Past defeats, he judged, could all be attributed to this cause:

  ‘Our associations were hastily got up, composed of prodigious numbers, a false idea of strength was wrought up to the highest pitch, thence originated a sense of security which subsequent events proved to be false, and why? Because no real union existed at the bottom.’

McDouall’s answer to the problem was to turn to the newly-forming working class; only it had the necessary potential strength. He believed Chartists should be active in the trade unions, win them over for the cause and use them as a basis for Chartist agitation.

However, some Chartists saw the trade unions not as possible allies but as rivals. A number of Yorkshire Chartist branches had a rule that members should take part ‘in no agitation but for The Charter.’ They regarded union activity as a diversion, side-tracking people from the real struggle. Sometimes this suspicion was reciprocated. In North East England for example, some trade unionists had actually struck at the beginning of the ‘sacred month’ but since it had turned out to be such a fiasco, some of them severed their Chartist connections.

On another issue, McDouall was opposed to the growing British Empire.

   ‘Let all who have possessions in India, or all who profit by what you call ‘our Indian possessions’ be off to India, and fight a thousand battles for them as they like… but let them not mock our degradation by asking us, working people to fight alongside them, either for our ‘possessions’ in India, or anywhere else, seeing that we do not possess a single acre of ground, or any other description of property in our own country, much less colonies, or ‘possessions’ in any other, having been robbed of everything we ever earned by the middle and upper classes… On the contrary, we have an interest in prospective loss or ruin of all such ‘possessions’, seeing they are but instruments of power in the hands of our domestic oppressors.’

He stood for parliament at Northampton in June 1841 but came bottom of the poll. After representing Ashton in the convention of April 1842, he was the principal supporter of the general strike movement in August and it was he who drafted the executive’s very forceful address to the people. The government offered a £100 reward for his apprehension, but he escaped to France, where he lived for the next two years. He was able to return to Britain without prosecution during 1844 and resumed his life as a Chartist agitator, publishing The Charter: What It Means! The Chartists: What They Want! in 1845.

1848 was Europe’s Year of Revolutions. He spoke at numerous rallies spurring masses of people into self-activity. After he spoke at Glasgow in March a riot occurred, followed by another in Edinburgh, where there were shouts of ‘Vive la Republique’ and ‘Bread and Revolution’. Although McDouall’s presence led the authorities to link him with the disturbances, it seems that those responsible were destitute Irish and unemployed Scots.

He then again unsuccessfully contested the parliamentary seat of Carlisle. He was a member of the Chartists national assembly and, once more elected to the executive, was at the heart of another insurrectionary conspiracy where he ended up doing two years’ hard-labour gaol for his part in the abortive Ashton-under-Lyne rising. His family suffered badly during this time, and a daughter, aged 10, died. After his release and after a failed attempt to re-start his medical career, McDouall took his family and emigrated to Australia in 1854, but died soon after arriving. His family returned to England to an impoverished future. The Northern Star wrote in 1848:

  ‘When he came among you, he had good property in Scotland, a profession and a practice, which realised him several hundred pounds annually, besides a large sum of accumulated money in the bank. All of which has been spent long ago in the advocacy of the rights of the people.’

ALJO

Book Review: The Origins of British Bolshevism by Raymond Challinor (1978)

Book Review from the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of British Bolshevism by Raymond Challinor (Croom Helm Ltd.)

This useful addition to the library of working-class political history gives a reasonable account of the movements which established the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain, and the Communist Party of Gt. Britain. The chapters describing the effect of the Russian Revolution on the SLP are particularly enlightening.

Starting out, in 1903, under the influence of the American orator Daniel De Leon, the SLP was anti-parliamentarian and advocated Industrial Unionism by means of which the workers would "take and hold". With the establishment of the Leninist dictatorship, the SLP swallowed (with some hesitancy) the Russian pill. Its paper, The Socialist, declared: "The theories of Lenin . . . are similar to those advocated by the SLP", and: "For years the SLP has been sneered at, but now Russia, in the transition towards the Socialist Republic, shows the SLP is right". (The Socialist, March 1918)

As his book deals only with what he calls British Bolshevism, perhaps Prof. Challinor may be excused his complete omission of any mention of the SPGB's stance on the Russian upheaval which was the opposite of the SLP's: from the beginning we said there will be no Socialism in Russia.

The subsequent revelations of the intrigues and manoeuvres of Bell, MacManus and Paul to wheel the entire SLP into the new Communist Party; the exposure of the lavish distribution of Russian funds by Theodore Rothstein, in 1920 a Comintern agent but in 1907 a Menshevik (who wrote in Justice, the SDF paper: "Is there any sane man who doubts that the present Russian Revolution cannot lead to Socialism?") Willie Gallacher, returning from Moscow to break up SLP meetings and economics classes of those who would not join the CP (Yes, they were doing it in 1921!) terminating in the utter and complete failure of the CP (using Leninist tactics) to capture the Labour Party—all these make pretty gruesome reading. By 1923 the original SLP contingent were ousted and pensioned off and replaced by Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt.

The sorry truth of the ignominious failure of the CP now finally exposed, its ridiculously inflated membership figures (for Russian consumption) admitted by Klugman (the party's official historian) never to have exceeded 2/3,000 - but making much noise with 2/3,000 paid organizers, speakers, writers and agitators and numerous "front" organizations. Most pathetic of all is Prof. Challinor's conclusion. Seeking to teach others, he has learned absolutely nothing himself from the SLP's destruction in the Russian disaster. Bemoaning the passing of a party which started out in rebellion against the reformism of the Social Democratic Federation as a group of worker-stalwarts trying to master and teach Marxism as they saw it, but getting caught up and destroyed by Bolshevik intrigues, our Prof. actually repeats word for word the same dreary rubbish the Trotskyists of various shades have regurgitated for years: "Smashing the State", "Soviets", "Build the Vanguard" etc etc.

The lessons are, he says: "Work with the Trade Unions for Workers' Control"; "Build the movement for independent working class education" and "The need for a new type of working class party to act as a vanguard" because the SLP evolved the Bolshevik approach independently of the Russians (p. 281) - despite the fact that his whole book is just an obituary of the SLP which actually took this line. But it's quite a good read.

Horatio

Letter: Naked truth (2000)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I was impressed by David A. Perrin's history of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, well researched and well written. But I have a cavil relating to myself. He says my book. The Origins of British Bolshevism hardly gives a mention to the formation of the SPGB. This is correct. But surely the SPGB has never claimed to be Bolshevik, and therefore stood outside the remit of my frame of reference.

Moses Baritz was mentioned in the book because in those days the Left was inhabited by weird and wonderful creatures. Socialism at that time was a strange idea and consequently tended to attract strange individuals.

David Perrin could perhaps have said that I gave much more prominence to another eccentric—John S. Clarke—one of the SLP early leaders. I even wrote a short biography about him. It was entitled John S. Clarke: Parliamentarian, Poet and Lion-tamer. The Glasgow Herald, in its obituary of him, stated Mr Clarke claimed to have been the youngest and oldest person to enter the lion's den. He had around his body many scars which attested to the nature of his trade. On one occasion he was bowled over by a tiger with toothache. With the animal towering over him, he stroked it and pulled out the offending tooth.

One of my subsidiary reasons for writing his biography was that I hoped it would act as a model to other parliamentarians. In my opinion, British politics today would be much better if more Members of Parliament took up lion-taming, preferably specialising in tigers with toothache.

Then there was the SLP's general secretary Frank Budgen. He published the first cheap edition of The Communist Manifesto. He was a friend of the great Irish writer, James Joyce, who wrote a poem which begins "Oh, boozy Budgen and canvas dauber." He earned his living as an artist's model. I have a drawing of Frank Budgen naked, but, after much heart-searching, I decided not to include it in The Origins of British Bolshevism.

It might have tempted the general secretaries of other political parties to cast off all garments. That would have created the ultimate obscenity. For instance, would members of the SPGB like so see, plastered everywhere, drawings of their general secretary stark naked?

Raymond Challinor, 

Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear

In defense of capitalism (1995)

Book Review from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Essays on the Second World War by Raymond Challinor (Bewick Press)

This book lives up to its title, being a collection of articles written for different journals over the years on working class discontent in Britain during the Second World War.

Challinor is under no illusion as to why the war was fought, not to 'defend democracy' and 'defeat fascism' but to defend the conflicting economic and strategic interests of the ruling classes of the countries involved.

He gives a good account of what these interests were but his main theme is about how warring governments also have to take steps to maintain 'the will to fight' amongst the population they rule over. His contention is that, on a number of occasions in Britain, this was in danger of being undermined, but that this was hushed up - and so successfully contained - by the authorities.

Challinor describes how the Labour Party was a loyal defender of the British Empire (one of the key issues at stake in the war) both before and during the war, even ordering the bombing of tribespeople in Iraq to protect British oil interests there. He reminds us too of the ultra-jingoist position adopted by the Communist Party, though only after the German attack on Russia on 21 June 1941. Before that they had loyally supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact, calling for a negotiated peace with Germany, a demand Challinor shows had more widespread support amongst people (and not just Moscow puppets or Nazi sympathisers) than we have been led to believe.

Challinor writes as a Trotskyist (though at the time he was a member of the old ILP, not that the two were incompatible) and so exaggerates not the discontent itself, but the possibilities of exploiting it for anti-war ends. Despite this, this is a book which will be of interest to Socialists. It also contains a number of well-aimed cartoons, one which we reproduce here.

Adam Buick