Laboured love (2020)

Book Review from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Love and Labour. (Red Button Years – Volume 1). By Ken Fuller. ISBN: 978-1-6990-9278-1. 2019.

As there is no publisher accredited, we presume this is a self-published book. The author lists seven other books, six being non-fiction. One of them, ‘Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1980s’, published by Lawrence and Wishart in 1985, provided the basis for this story.

Self-publishing has become widely available due to technological advances making it much more affordable. It is an avenue for authors of books, fiction and non-fiction, with such limited appeal as to be unlikely to generate profit enough, or even at all, to interest commercial publishers.

This must not be taken to imply such books are badly written, but rather their appeal is to a limited audience due to the subject matter. The weakness of the process can be the absence of the critical eye of an experienced editor. Such is my the overall impression of this novel.

There can be no doubting Ken Fuller’s immersion in the subject on which he writers. A former bus driver and full-time officer in the Transport and General Workers Union, he has dedicated much of his life to exploring and recording the history of this element of trade unionism, with specific reference to London. Perhaps he is too close to his subject.

A basic tenet of writing good fiction is ‘show, don’t tell’, engage the reader, invite the reader to construct mental scenes, challenge those constructs through the story taking unexpected turns. Reading should be an active process.

Unfortunately, this novel does an awful lot of telling. There is page after page of what reads like verbatim minutes of union meetings. Anyone who has been active in a union will recognise how drawn out and, frankly, tedious, even though important, such meetings can be. Especially so for someone on the outside glancing in.

Fuller does not seem clear as to his intention. As a chronicler of London bus workers’ history he has undoubtedly a creditable depth of knowledge. He is also keenly aware of the wider contexts in which that history flowed its course.

However, to make sure no research goes to waste, characters find their mouths being over over-stuffed with historical details. They don’t so much have conversations so much as swap lectures. For example, George Sanders, a union official, delivers an impromptu potted history of London Transport companies, along with American influence and dividend returns while standing, supposedly chatting, at Hyde Park Corner.

The novel opens in 1913 and works its way through to 1917. Its two main characters are Mickey Rice, erstwhile tram driver in Reading who becomes a bus conductor, then driver, in London, and Dorothy Bridgeman.

Dorothy has fled a privileged, but stifling upbringing, to become a radical socialist in what would become the Leninist sense. Dorothy and Mickey become lovers as well as union comrades and we are treated to a number of their explicitly erotic scenes.

The first of these is revealing (sorry) in that mid-coitus Mickey and Emily, the name Dorothy was using at the time, engage in a discussion on the radical, or otherwise, nature of impromptu sex. Emily (Dorothy) concludes, it is ‘…no threat whatsoever to the bourgeois order – unless, that is, they also embrace the class struggle.’ (Page 52).

Both are fictional characters, but many others are historical personages. As such they serve to give voice to the competing elements within the burgeoning Red Button, a reference to the badge worn by bus workers’ union members, union.

Dorothy takes the story off into London’s seriously impoverished East End when she meets and allies herself with Sylvia Pankhurst, who has split from Christabel and Emmeline who betray themselves by becoming purveyors of white feathers activists as they aid the war’s recruiting drive.

Dorothy ends up in Holloway after indulging in the suffragette habit of smashing windows; a hammer being more effective than a rock, Sylvia opines. This leads her to conclude that breaking windows changes nothing.

The First World War does energise the novel, especially the accounts of those trying to stop workers killing each other on behalf of capital. The danger this invites in a jingoistic atmosphere is explored and does point up that the war effort was not universally popular.

Fuller explores how circumstance, especially extreme circumstance, can affect an individual. When Dorothy is killed by a German bomb, Mickey seriously considers enlisting. He is eventually talked out of it by Dorothy’s ‘ghost’ as his own conscience and political consciousness manifest through his memories of her voice.

The politics of the novel focus on the role of the British Socialist Party, the Labour Party and the ILP. There is a Leninist thread represented by the character Rothstein, but the main focus is on the union and competing factions within it.

A familiar story of the left-right dichotomy, still playing out over a hundred years later. The pro- versus anti- war elements give expression to this, and there is some understanding of how capitalism is the root cause of war. There is no mention that in the ten years leading up to the war’s outbreak the Socialist Party of Great Britain had consistently voiced this point.

Indeed socialism, as dealt with in this book, is to be achieved via reformism or some Bolshevik-style revolution. That the working class will have to look beyond trade unions and political parties vying for power and achieve socialism through its own conscious action is not addressed.

Any undertaking on the scale of this novel is admirable. It appears to me, though , there is a much better novel in here begging to be revealed. I started This review began by invoking the role of the editor. If the book was 200 pages shorter it would be 200 pages better.

‘Love and Labour’ is a labour of love on the author’s part, and also the reader’s. Dispense with the potted histories, the detailed accounts of union machinations and let the story emerge. Dorothy and Mickey are strong characters, but even they are too often recruited as mouthpieces for the author.

Dave Alton

Blogger's Note:

Ken Fuller's book, Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1980s, was reviewed in the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard. It was of particular interest to Socialist Standard readers 'cos a couple of SPGBers, Frank Snelling and Bill Waters, were active in the Busworkers' rank and file movement in the 1930s.

On the SPGB website, Ken Fuller replied to the above review. Reproduced in full below:

The author the book “Love and Labour” has sent in this reply:

Dear Comrade,

I was in two minds whether to respond to your review of my novel, Love and Labour, but decided that, in view of the fact that your reviewer gets certain details wrong, I should do so.

Your reviewer is of the view that the novel would have benefited from the services of an expert editor. Maybe so, but he seems to have missed the point, as what he describes as “union machinations” constitute one of the major themes of the book. (An expert editor could also have eliminated the several typos which disfigure the review.)

Most damningly, however, there is evidence that your reviewer gave but cursory attention to the book. For example, he complains that George Sanders, while standing at Hyde Park Corner, goes into great detail concerning the history of the Traffic Combine, even to the extent of mentioning the rate of dividend. Well, no. In fact, Sanders is driving Dorothy Bridgeman to her interview for a job at the London General Omnibus Company, where she will gather intelligence for the red-button union. Surely it is reasonable in these circumstances for Sanders to voice his concern that the profits of the LGOC (with its 20 percent dividend) will be used to subsidise the Underground rather than being used to improve the wages and conditions of busworkers!

Then again, your reviewer has Dorothy thrown into prison for breaking windows a la Sylvia Pankhurst. In fact, she ends up in Holloway for throwing rocks at a tram driven by a strike breaker at the tail end of the London Tram Strike of 1915. Given the fact that the account of the tram strike constitutes one of the longest chapters in the book, it is difficult to see how such a mistake could have been made, unless the reviewer’s attention was elsewhere.

Then again, the review mentions in passing “the character Rothstein” with apparently no understanding of the fact that Theodore Rothstein was a towering figure in the socialist and anti-war movements of the period.

I would have posted the above as a comment after the review, but can see no way of logging on, as I am not a member. I would therefore be grateful if you would insert it for me.

Yours fraternally,

Ken Fuller.

Marx in Soho (2001)

Book Review from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx in Soho. By Howard Zinn. South End Press, distributed by Pluto Press.

Granted his request to return to earth for just one hour, to clear his name and refute the rumour that his ideas are dead, a bureaucratic mix-up finds Karl Marx in Soho, New York, instead of Soho, London where he once lived.

This short, one-man play sees Marx alone on stage, with only a table, a chair, books, newspapers and a glass of beer as props, reminiscing about his family life, enthusing about the Paris Commune and reliving an imaginary confrontation with the “shaggy anarchist” Bakunin.

Zinn's Marx can be humorous one page, and deadly serious the next in vitriolic condemnation of a system he spent his life trying to overthrow. One moment Marx is recounting his countless journeys home from the British Museum, past open sewers telling how it was “only fitting that the author of Das Kapital should slog through shit while writing the condemnation of the capitalist system”. The next he is grappling on the floor with a drunken Bakunin. Then, just as suddenly, we can hear the bearded man launch a vehement attack upon the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist: “Do they think that a system run by a thug who murdered his fellow revolutionaries is communism? Scheisskopfen . . . can that be the communism I gave my life for? . . . Angry. . . Socialism is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!”

For anyone coming into contact with Marx's ideas for the first time, dreading the thought of long, studious hours in front of volumes of insipid texts on political economy, having only ever heard second-hand, distorted accounts of Marx's theories, fear not; this is a welcome first point of reference in which Zinn makes his ideas accessible and the man himself, less the spectre that haunted Europe, than some 19th century alternative comedian who just happens to know what capitalism is really all about.

The Labour Theory of Value, the Materialist Conception of History and the Class Struggle are all Marxian ideas that get aired in this short work, as well as concepts such as nationalism and alienation.

And one thing is certain; Marx in Soho is not just Marx speaking. Zinn is very much in agreement with Marx. When Marx, despairing at the consumer culture that has evolved says; “Doesn't anyone read history? . . . what kind of shit do they teach in the schools these days?” this is the real Zinn speaking, the Zinn whose books such as A People's History of the Unites States, are proscribed in US schools.

His hour up, Marx is about to leave the stage but stops and turns. “Do you resent my coming back and irritating you?” he asks. “Look at it this way. Christ couldn't make it, so Marx came.”

It's been an hour well spent. Marx is vindicated. His theories are still relevant. Socialism is not dead—it was never tried. The philosophers are still interpreting the world, whilst the point is still to change it.

John Bissett

Review: "Wake Up, England!" (1910)

Book Review from the September 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Wake Up, England! Being the Story of John Bull—Socialist.” by Edward Prince (St. Stephen's Press)

This is a stupid book — a clumsy book. It is addressed more particularly to anti-Socialists, and, in the guise of a badly written tale, endeavours to convey some idea of the state of things thirty years after the Revolution. The author would certainly have succeeded better had Nature, endowed him with a brain, but there, as the volume is directed to those equally lacking in intelligence, no great harm will be done.

But to get on with the ganglionic perturbation under notice. The chief character is a doctor, a man whose mental calibre may be estimated quite as highly as the author’s, when it is known that although he worked and voted for Socialism and lived for thirty years after its advent, at the end of that period he knows nothing about it. The “hero” of the book, John Bull, is a weak, phthisical boy, a manifest importation from capitalism, with bad eyes, a morose, taciturn disposition, a longing to be alone, and a hatred of his kind. He attempts to murder a man who runs off with his wife, and finishes up by drowning himself. Another “great” character, with a longing for the “good old times,” is William Sykes, who did a “night’s work" in the days of capitalism and came out of prison after the establishment of the new order. With this single exception, and that attended with disaster, Bill Sykes had never done a stroke of work in his life, and his misguided father, just before quitting this vale of tears, reproached him with being a tramp, and left him 10s. a week and a cottage so that toil and Bill Sykes should for ever remain estranged. Bill, by waging a kind of guerrilla warfare with the “ fishals” succeeds in living as a parasite upon his fellows, a fact which seems to afford our author immense satisfaction.

The officials, by the way, are most carious creatures—weird composites of all that is most petty and tyrannical in the vilest of capitalist shop-foremen, the most parsimonious of poor-law guardians, and the most stupid of police inspectors. By everyone hated and despised, the author is compelled to invent an impossibility to account for their retention of office. He calls it “being responsible for a majority.” Exactly how it works is not apparent to those devoid of the eye of faith. It may be clear to the author, but his secret is safe, anyway.

In brief, this bile-producing ‘‘work” is a very bad rehash of the “break-up of-family-life,” “Socialism — means — Atheism, therefore — bad,” “Socialism-means-death to-incentive” tags: silly statements, as we all know, with which Methuselah whiled away his childhood. After perusing this colossal tome the inhabitants of Frying Pan Ally and Paradise Place will number themselves with the happiest of mortals. The free and independent citizen who is fifteen weeks in arrear with the rent, and finds himself and his family kicked out in the rain, will still be able to gaze into the smiling, sunny faces of his emaciated family and congratulate himself on the preservation of his family life, his immortal soul, and his incentive —especially his incentive. He can still say as the sole drops off his only boot and he gets run in for being without visible means, “thank Gawd it aint Sosherlism, anyhow ! ”

The present writer is glad he hasn't got it on his conscience that he paid for the copy he has read.

Wilfred.

About Books (1953)

From the November 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some old-timers in the Trade Unions together with a few in the rebel fringe of the Labour Party, even a few of the older members of the S.P.G.B. have been heard to claim that certain novels read in their younger days were the means of guiding their steps in the direction of Socialism.

Foremost amongst the books which are accorded this honour is Robert Tressall's 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists." We have been asked a number of times to draw this book to the attention of younger readers of the SOCIALIST STANDARD, although, if a person is already a reader of the SOCIALIST STANDARD he will not glean much education from Tressall's book. But he will get a world of fun and a clear insight into conditions in the building and house decorating trades during the first decade of this century.

The book was first printed in 1914 and has been continuously reprinted ever since. It is a story written round the life and work of an imaginary Frank Owen, a house painter and a Socialist (if we excuse a little confusion in his theory) and the small band of his workmates. Owen takes every opportunity in arguments with his mates to expound his Socialist ideas, doing so very simply and effectively for the reader, but hopelessly for his mates.

Certain chapters in the book are more than humorous, they are uproariously funny and there is deep tragedy, too. It is argued by some that this is the story of Robert Tressall's own life. Certainly Tressall was a house painter and, from what little we know of his life there are grounds for the claim. If you are one of the very few who have not read this book, do so. It is still in print and in plentiful supply. If you are one of the old ones who read it years ago, read it again. We have just re-read it before writing about it and we had great fun.

Another book that gets commended for similar reasons is Jack London's "Iron Heel." This is an altogether different book from Tressall's. It has been published in many editions since it first appeared nearly fifty years ago and the latest is still to be seen on bookstalls.

Jack London tells his story through the mouth of the wife of a man called Ernest Everhard who was a "Socialist" who would fit very nicely into the present day Communist Party. It is a story of the development of Capitalism in America projected into the years ahead of the time of telling. It tells of the ever increasing exploitation and subjugation of the workers by a capitalist oligarchy called "The Iron Heel," of the hardening and sharpening of the class struggle and of two bloody insurrections that result in the defeat and massacre of the workers.

Despite the quite good lectures and arguments of Ernest Everhard and some of his associates, this book would never, on its own, convert anyone to Socialism. Its main appeal is emotional and by that means it might urge a man to study class society seriously. But a worker whose approach to social problems is purely emotional is ready prey for political parties which rely on the emotional upsurge of their supporters and not on a clear understanding of working class interests.

A third book in this category is Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," also still in print after forty-seven years. This book was mentioned in these columns in May, 1953. It os a story of the American stock yards and, although it is a remarkably fine story, the same criticism applies as to Jack London's book.

Whether these books are useful to put in the hands of a non-socialist worker with the hope of leading him, by their guidance, along the path to an understanding of Socialism, once he is on that path he will enjoy reading them and we have little doubt but that most convinced Socialists have read them. If they haven't, then we can recommend them to an honourable place on the book shelf.

W. Waters 

Turgenev's "Virgin Soil" (1965)

From the July 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a popular misconception of Marxist materialism that it can be used to establish a rigidly determining link between economic factors and appearance of, for example, works of literature. This is a vulgar and mechanistic interpretation of what materialism sets out to explain. There is no law of economic inevitability that provides a formula for a determining link between economic factors and the creative ability that appears from time to time uniquely in the personality of one artist. Nevertheless, the social framework provides the possibilities within which the talent of artists expresses itself and comes to fruition.

Moreover, the whole history of literature, its form, and subject matter, can be shown to have a developing relationship with the development of all other aspects of society and ultimately hinges upon economic evolution.  Especially can the work of 19th century Russian writers present a clear and explicit example of how literature can be closely involved in political controversies and can reflect the conflict of social forces which are ultimately of a class nature.

Due to the intolerance and authoritarianism of Russian life, there was a complete absence  of freedom of speech in print. There was no freedom whatsoever for the kind of political pamphleteering that was common in Western Europe. Even so, great controversies did rage and the tradition grew up that viewpoints were expressed through the medium of fiction. Turgenev was one writer who used his art as a vehicle for polemics and pamphleteering, so much so, that after incurring the Tsar's displeasure for his polemical tone, he went into exile in 1855 and spent the remainder of his life in Baden and Paris.

In Turgenev's novel "Virgin Soil", the major forces of Russian 19th century society are shown interlocked in close conflict. The character of Kollomietzev personifies the rigidity of the established landed aristocracy and typifies what Engels described in 1874 as " . . . oriental despotism whose arbitrariness we in the west simply cannot imagine. A despotism which from day to day comes into more glaring contradiction with the views of the enlightened classes and in particular with those of the rapidly developing bourgeoisie."

In drawing the character of Kollomietzev, Turgenev describes the affected arrogant postures of the landed nobility. "The only principle that I acknowledge," remarks Kollomietzev, "is the whip." He holds the toiling masses in complete contempt, regarding than as less than animals, and sees the church and the government as necessarily oppressive instruments of upper class authority. He sees his own social role as that of upholding privilege, and leading a life as remote as possible from useful production. He despises even what he considers to be the vulgarity of the capitalists' interest in factories and commercial profit.

Sipiagin is a man of property who is interested in factory production. In outlook, he is more flexible, liberal minded and free from the stultifying prejudices of his fellow landowner. In the novel he goes to some lengths to win over into his own employment an efficient factory manager. Such competent technical men in Russia were rare.

The novel also includes a collection of revolutionaries who are referred to as "socialists." They are forced to operate underground, as a secret society. Though they are inspired and dedicated, they conduct their conspiracies with a completely false and unrealistic view of Russian social consciousness. One of the revolutionaries insists that soon " . . . there would be nothing to hinder them from making a 'beginning' as the masses refused to wait any longer!"

They cannot come to terms with the general ignorance that precludes any useful point of contact between the peasants and their own well-developed ideas, and cover failure with self-reproach, lamenting their own inadequacies. "He wrote a long letter to his friend Silin about the whole thing, in which he bitterly regretted his incapacity, putting it down to the vile education he had received and his hopelessly aesthetic nature." In the book, the activities of the revolutionaries inevitably end in failure and disillusion.

In his essay "Social Relations in Russia", Engels predicted revolution in the offing, but it must be said that he did not extend its possibilities to the introduction of Socialism. The farthest that he would go was in saying that "  . . . it will destroy at one blow the last, so far intact, reserve of the entire European (landed) reaction," which of course it did.

Turgenev's "Virgin Soil" is about the unresolved nature of 19th century Russian politics, and its stifling effect upon the historical demand for industrialisation. The longer the balance of economic forces that underlay this political indecision continued, the more critical became the dislocation between dynamic European capitalism and the faltering vacillation of Russian society. At the same time the Russian state was inextricably involved in Western Europe, whether it desired it or not, especially about the waging of war.

It is a matter of history now that the discrepant relationship between Russia and Europe reached its critical climax in October 1917. With the decisive shock of the Bolshevik revolution, Russia at last became unreservedly committed to the building of industrial capitalism.

Although the characters in Turgenev's novel represent economic and political forces, except for two who are deliberate caricatures, this does not diminish them as human personalities. As the novel unfolds itself, they act and react with convincing realism. This is history in microcosm, with men, seldom conscious of their historical role, clashing as individuals in specific situations, prejudiced, bigoted, pragmatic, idealistic, but ultimately intelligible within a framework of material struggle and class conflict.

Pieter Lawrence

This article has been compiled from notes taken at a recent discussion at the Bromley Group.

The Day Is Coming (1944)

Book Review from the November 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

The above is the title of a book by William Cameron (MacMillan, New York). It is the story of a craftsman who commenced work in the 'eighties. The story finishes just before the outbreak of the present war. The book is divided into three periods: the first is concerned with the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Guild in the East End of London; the second describes the transfer and establishment of the Guild in the beautiful little old town of Westencote in the Cotswold Hills, where it flourished for ten years and then collapsed, killed by commercial competition: the third period covers the privations of the craftsman and his family back in London, and the way he climbed up to comfort again.

It is the life of a man singularly fortunate in the beginning who, immersed in the early crafts revival and in an almost self-contained community, loses contact with the world until he reaches middle age. Then, on the dissolution of the craft community, he returns to face the pitiless world of capitalist competition and cheap production into which he has difficulty fitting. He sinks for a time into despair, passes through the horrors of a great war, loses his treasured possessions, loses his faith in the possibility of social change, and, finally, accepts and fits into a cheap and nasty world for the sake of economic security. As an escape from the things that he hates, he builds himself a dream world of his own which goes back to mediaeval times. Into this world he retires in his leisure moments, letting the world of reality go by and accepting all its evil manifestations with an "of course and of course." In his old age the ominous rumblings that herald the impending catastrophe of 1939 set him searching for a safe place to live in the country, and he goes back to Westencote. But the town has become almost unrecognisable. The motor car, the aeroplane and the jerrybuilder have swept away the beauty he used to enjoy. The reaction drives him to the bottle, and in a drunken dream on the hillside above the town he is revisited by William Morris and the old circle of craftsmen, who show him a vision of the hell to which civilisation is heading, reproach him for his supineness, and urge him to take up again the struggle for social change lest the people, and their capacity for beauty and happiness, sink to utter destruction. Waking, he makes the great decision that converts him to a man again. 

Reading this book brings back to the mind memories that crowd of times long since gone by. The vigorous and youthful 'nineties, the beginning of the new century with its hopes and promise. 1914 and the shattering of a world; the hansom cab, the motor car, and the aeroplane; dreams, enthusiasms, and the starkness of reality. The author has told his story well, and his vivid descriptions of the East End, its people and its ways are excellent. So also are the criticisms of society, social movements and social products which are threaded through the book—sometimes with gentleness, sometimes with savagery, and sometimes with cynicism. It is a pity that nearly all the characters he has chosen to make these criticisms are the less cultured working men, thus giving some support to a false idea of the intellectual capacity of workers, which will inspire in some readers a sympathetic and patronising pity.

We would like to have given some representative selections from the book, but our restricted space will not permit it. We will, however, give one extract from the first few pages as a specimen.

The story opens with an account of a meeting held by the Socialist League on a foggy November night in 1887 in the East End. A beer crate is set up in the market place in the midst of fish, whelk, tomato, cabbage and old clothes stalls, and the meeting is accompanied by drunken brawls and the stall-holders shouting their wares. William Morris is the speaker, and his audience consists of a few poverty-stricken and decrepit people of the neighbourhood. To these people Morris addresses burning words, of which the following is an extract:-

France is arming and Germany arming! The whole civilised world rumbles with the threat of war on the most monstrous scale of modern times! At this period of crisis, this is the message of the Socialist League to the working men of England: Turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant! Refuse to be dressed up in red and taught to form a part of the modern killing-machine for the honour and glory of a country which gives you only a dog's share of many kicks and few halfpence!

There are many other meetings, lectures and conversations in which Morris and others of his group express in forthright language their condemnation of present society and their propaganda in favour of a new social order from which poverty and ugliness will be banished. A social order in which the things that are made will be useful and beautiful and the makers will work happily because they will find joy in their work. One of the main threads woven into the story is a hatred of ugly, scamped, and shoddy work.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain appears in a few places in the story, and there are quotations from our principles and our 1914 War Manifesto. We are sorry that its chosen representatives should belong to the less cultured group to which we have already referred. They drop their aitches, put them in where they don't belong, and express themselves in language that does not suggest great reading. This does not convey a correct impression. The early members of the Party were bent on building a higher form of society and made great efforts under difficult circumstances to acquire as much culture as they could in all directions because they wished to be worthy of a place in the society they intended to build. A few of those active in the early days were Watts (a carver), Fitzgerald (a bricklayer), Anderson (a house-painter), Elrick (a civil servant), Gray (a railway clerk), Jacomb (a compositor), Kent (a commercial traveller), and Lehane ( we forget what he was except a wild Irishman!). Some of these men were genuine craftsmen. They did not use the pronunciation of Oxford or Earls Court, but plain, accurate and forcible English, and their aspirates were in the right place!

A further criticism we would make concerns certain remarks that could have been left out without marring the pictures of a character or an event—in fact, in places the picture would have been strengthened without them. We will give an illustration of what we mean.

When the Westencote community collapsed and the craftsman realised a dream had vanished and he would have to go back to the old grind, he packed up and then went for a walk up the hill for a last look back at the little own.

"He was glad May wasn't with him—or the children. He wanted no one. He sank down on the grass, and peered down into the great valley below. At that moment, if the most beautiful woman in the world had been lying naked with him in that lonely spot, he might have thrust her aside as a nuisance.
"'Might,' he thought with a grin, as he saw once again the bodies of the girls and women with whom he had shared adventures since his marriage." (Page 328.)

Imagine a man who has just seen the bottom fall out of his world having thought to spare such a grin. Curse, foam at the mouth, shake his fists at the sky—yes, but a sly leer? We cannot imagine it.

Again, after the birth of the craftsman's child, another craftsman said to him, referring to the former's wife :—

"She's a good cow, Arthur; just like my ol' missis. . . . A woman, Arthur, ought to be a good, well-fed cow. If she ain't—why, then, she's udderly useless!" (Page 294.)

Does it sound credible that a member of the Socialist League would talk like this at a time when woman's position in society was a burning question? 

For some peculiar reason, modern novelists who aspire to "Leftishness" feel that they must indulge in his kind of thing. Perhaps they fear a charge of squeamishness, or they are staking a claim for popularity: When it was necessary to shock the reader there was some ground for it, but modern readers are past shocking. Fortunately, Cameron has not allowed much of this to creep in, but we wish he had kept it out of this type of book altogether, as it is a blemish here and brings the reader up with a nasty jerk.

We make these criticisms because the book was well worth doing, is well done, and is well worth reading. It is a vivid and authentic picture of a vital section of the life of the last fifty years. It should stand the ravages of time.

Gilmac.

Edward Upward and the British Communist Party (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Edward Upward is the pseudonym of Allan Chalmers. He was born in Romford in 1903, educated at Repton School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he obtained a degree in history and English. After a life-time of public school teaching Upward retired to the Isle of Wight, where he still lives.

Upward occupies a minor, but interesting, place in British literature; although his literary career has spanned almost fifty years his output is small, consisting of just six novels. His early writing, however, augmented by contributions to New Country, New Writing and Left Review.

Upward belonged to the group of literary intellectuals who were attracted to the British Communist Party in the 1930s. The group included the poets W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and the novelist Christopher Isherwood, a close friend of Upward's at Cambridge. Upward influenced Auden, Spender and Isherwood, in their early years as writers, particularly during their flirtation with Communism. He wrote the trilogy The Spiral Ascent which, for all its faults, provides a remarkable document of Communist Party membership in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the "fellow-travellers" Auden and Isherwood, who defected to America, and Spender who accepted a knighthood, Upward has clung, almost tenaciously, to the Leninist dogma of his youth. And in 1986, at the age of 83 he produced a book of short stories, The Night Walk with the same heavy-handed dogmatism which marred his early works.

The Spiral Ascent consists of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969) and No Home But the Struggle (1977) which traces the career of Alan Sebrill, a publci schoolmaster, who joins the Communist Party in the 1930s and remains a member for sixteen years, finally resigning because of the revisionist policy of the British Communist Party. Sebrill retires to the Isle of Wight and involvement with CND movement in the final book.

Sebrill's arguments with Aldershaw, another schoolmaster, provides an interesting insight into Communist Party members' ideas. Aldershaw asserts that Marx's conviction that advanced capitalism would provide the conditions for socialism to replace it was mistaken because the Russian revolution took place in an economically backward country. In reply Sebrill makes the same mistake in failing to appreciate that the Russian revolution was a coup d'etat which replaced serfdom with state capitalism and states that capitalism had to be broken at its weakest point. When Aldershaw says: "Tyranny has often been violently overthrown, but it has never yet developed gradually into liberty. Dictatorship of whatever kind is an absolute evil." Sebrill replies: " . . . I don't agree that all dictatorships are equally bad. It depends upon what or whom they are directed against."

When Sebrill applies for membership of the Communist Party he is asked why he wants to join. He wants to say that "the independence of the middle class was being increasingly undermined and would soon cease to exist and that the only hope for members of his class was to go over to the side of the workers against the monopoly capitalists". However, he feels that this sounds too abstract and talks about the dishonesty which he, as a teacher, is compelled to practice to keep his job.

Thus, Upward portrays his misconception of class. Sebrill's "middle class" ideas are considered too abstract for the workers in the branch yet the fact that he has to be dishonest to hold on to a job that he cannot afford to lose demonstrates his working class status.

In the second volume we find Sebrill married to Elsie, another Party member. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to their struggle to accommodate the frequently changing policies of the Communist Party in the late 1940s. Clearly, they are dismayed by the Party's support for conscription and its enthusiasm for nationalisation. After agonising over the theoretical correctness of Party policy and trying to justify the somersaults of the Party line they conclude: "Perhaps there's nothing wrong with the Party's policy at all." Eventually, after being accused of "international factionalism" by the Party hierarchy and further disenchantment with the Party's revisionist line they resign.

Upward's confusion over class interest; his complete misunderstanding of the way that Lenin's state capitalist views opposed Marx's ideas of a democratic, moneyless society makes it doubtful if he has any understanding of socialism at all. Like Upward, socialists wish to end capitalism but this will not be achieved by a dictatorial vanguard suppressing political opponents, undercover workers or leaders, but by workers understanding, wanting and working for socialism.

Old age has not dimmed Upward's vision as The Night Walk clearly shows. At times his attempts at self-vindication are uncomfortably strained, but occasionally a story provides a glimpse of his ability. In The Procession a painter watches his own funeral: the death of the painter he could have been, and The Poet Who Died expresses grief for an old friend who abandoned poetry for politics. In both of these stories Upward could, perhaps unwittingly, have been writing about himself.

Carl Pinel

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard May 1980: Literary lefties in the 1930s

News from Mars (1998)

Book Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod. Legend £5.99.

Here is an unusual novel, and not just because one of the major characters is the son of life-long members of the Socialist Party. It is a political science-fiction novel (like MacLeod's previous book The Star Fraction), with scenes ranging from recent student politics to a future "anarcho-capitalist" Mars.

Let's look as some of the passages relating to the Socialist Party. At one point the narrator meets his parents at that old Socialist stomping-ground, Speakers' Corner:

" . . . they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn't in full flow, I flipped through 'Is a Third World War Inevitable?': its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns—all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn't actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars."

This presents a reasonable description of the pamphlet in question, and gives a good idea of MacLeod's basic attitude to the Socialist Party: poking gentle fun at us, but in a basically friendly way. Elsewhere, the same character recalls some of his childhood memories:

"The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father's, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful."

A chance finding of the Russia today pamphlet Soviet Millionaires in a bookshop leads to the observation that "It hadn't stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist façade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners."

In an article in the science-fiction journal Matrix, MacLeod has discussed his political activities and ideas. He was for many years a Trotskyist, but also acknowledges that he was influenced by "thinking about the implications of the 'non-market socialism' associated with the few but persistent propagandists of the Socialist Party of Great Britain". And he mentions with approval William Morris's idea of Socialism as "a world-wide classless, stateless, moneyless society", using language rarely found outside the pages of the Socialist Standard. It is plain, too, that he now has little time for the traditional left.

However, he also refers to having learned from the so-called libertarians, professed advocates of capitalism with a "free" market and a minimal state. These are the ideas that have influenced the Martian society depicted here, though it still has room for authoritarian legal structures but "privatised" ones, so perhaps that's OK.

MacLeod describes The Stone Canal as "a communist novel about libertarians", but frankly its communist/socialist viewpoint is not explicit enough for this. Despite his apparent sympathy for the Socialist Party's view of the world, he has not written a communist/socialist novel. But he has written a highly-interesting one that may get some readers interested in knowing more about us. Read it—and hope that in future novels he may write more about the moneyless, classless society he states he wants.

Paul Bennett

Mixed Media: Marx in Soho (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx in Soho

Marx in Soho, the 1995 one-man play by Howard Zinn was recently produced at the Marx Library in London directed by Sergio Amigo and starring Daniel Kelly as Marx. Zinn portrays 'Marx as few people knew him, as a family man, struggling to support his wife and children' in a 'fantasy' where Marx returns but due to a bureaucratic error not to Soho, London where he lived, but to Soho in New York City. Marx has returned 'to clear my name!'

Zinn drew on insights into Marx's private life in Yvonne Kapp's biography of Eleanor Marx. Marx speaks of life in Soho: 'we were living in London. Jenny and I and the little ones. Plus two dogs, three cats, and two birds. Barely living. A flat on Dean Street, near where they dumped the city's sewage.' Marx speaks about his favourite daughter Eleanor, 'a precociously brilliant child' nicknamed 'Tussy' who is 'a revolutionary at the age of eight', plays chess with 'the Moor' (the family nickname for Marx 'because of my dark complexion'), drinks, smokes, and is enamoured of the Irish struggle which she learned from Lizzie Burns.

Marx is very witty: 'Marx is dead! Well I am … and I am not. That's dialectics for you', 'Understand one thing – I'm not a Marxist. I said that once to Pieper and he almost croaked' and 'My Ricardo! You pawned my Ricardo!' Zinn invents a visit to his home by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, no record of such a visit exists although they had met in Paris in 1844. Bakunin was an irrepressible revolutionary who arrived in London in 1861 at Alexander Herzen's home, bursting into the drawing-room where the family was having supper. 'What! Are you sitting down eating oysters! Well! Tell me the news. What is happening, and where?!'

Zinn portrays 'Marx angry that his theories had been so distorted as to stand for Stalinist cruelties and to rescue Marx from those who now gloated over the triumph of capitalism.' Zinn concludes the play with Marx proclaiming we should be 'using the incredible wealth of the earth for human beings. Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.'

Marx in Soho is highly recommended for socialist theatre-goers: 'Look at it this way. It is the second coming. Christ couldn't make it, so Marx came . . .'

Steve Clayton

A Slight Case of Censorship (1955)

Book Review the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell: Lawrence & Wishart, 30s.

Forty-five years ago a house-painter named Robert Noonan died in a workhouse hospital in Liverpool. He left an 18-year-old daughter in Hastings, and two years later she sold for £10 the manuscript he had entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; Being the Story of 12 months in Hell, told by one of the Damned, and written down by Robert Tressell. It was first published in 1914. Not many people read it in the next four years, while the philanthropists of the world were killing one another, but from its republication in 1918 it has been a continual best-seller.

Until the appearance of Mr. F. C. Ball's Tressell of Mugsborough in 1951, little was known about the book or its author. It was plainly a piece of autobiography— most people, in fact, believed that the author had committed suicide, as his hero Owen had done. Least known of all was the fact that the entire book had never been published. The most widely circulated edition was known to be an abridgement; it was in fact an abridgement of an abridgment, the "complete" edition containing only about two-thirds of the book as Noonan had written it.

The original editor, Jessie Pope, gave no hint of what damage she had done. She wrote merely:

"In reducing a large mass of manuscript to the limitations of book form, it has been my task to cut away superfluous matter and repetition only. The rest remains as it came from the pen of Robert Tressell, house-painter and signwriter, who recorded his criticism of the present scheme of things until, weary of the struggle, he slipped out of it."

A better pointer to why such extensive cuts were made was given by the publisher. Grant Richards, in his Author-Hunting. After speaking of the length, he said:

"The book was damnably subversive, but it was extraordinarily real . . . Did I do harm by spreading such a book broadcast ? I do not think so."

The complete book has now been published for the first time. The "superfluous matter and repetition" amounts to eleven chapters and some material from the remainder. One main character was erased altogether— Barrington, the well-to-do sentimental Socialist. Several of the expositions of Socialism, always presented as Owen's "lectures" to his workmates, actually belong to the Barrington episodes. Mr. Ball's guess is that "it wouldn't have done to let it be thought that a gentleman might have wit enough to see through the Capitalist system."

The sub-plot about Easton's wife and the Bible-punching lodger is developed to much greater length: Ruth has a baby, parts from and is reconciled with her husband. The excision of this section is probably, as the Preface suggests, "out of consideration for the prejudices of the time." Its inclusion adds a great deal to the novel. Noonan's sharp eye saw how little chance there was of married happiness in poverty—the fault was not in human beings but in the conditions which made a mockery of human relationships. The episode, like many of the other deleted sections, carries a strong criticism of religion. Noonan was especially bitter about Christianity (though his fore-word specifies " no attack . . . upon sincere religion "). He describes feelingly the "charitable" organizations and the smug religious humbugs of Mugsborough— more than anything else, his target is the gross, money-grabbing materialism of the Shining Light Chapel, its pastors and its worshippers.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a remarkable book. Its author was not an educated man in the conventional sense: his writing was often crude, his grammar often bad. He was a craftsman, a member of the Social-Democratic Federation, who had read and learned a bit more than most—enough to make him indignant where others were submissive. His story of painters is the story of what he saw, experienced and knew need not happen: the humiliation and degradation of the working class. He chronicles the despair of the man who wants to make the others see it too:

" 'Oh, damn the cause of poverty!' said one of the new hands. ' I've 'ad enough of this bloody row' . . . This individual had two patches on the seat of his trousers and the bottoms of the legs of that garment were frayed and ragged. He had been out of work for about six weeks previous to this job, and during most of that time he and his family had been existing in a condition of semi-starvation ..."

This is more than a picture of conditions half a century ago, however. If it were merely that, it would have been forgotten along with The Cry of the Children and The White Slaves of England. It is still in a large measure true today. Building workers are better paid and better treated now—mainly because of the unions which Noonan urged his mates to join; they are still poorly paid and without any security of employment. People who discover painters earning £10 a week forget (or don't know) that a painter who gets 50 weeks' work in a year is lucky. Or that the bonuses which bolster a painter's (and many another workman's) pay are only means for him to work himself out of a job the faster. The words of Noonan's sacked workmen can be echoed in a good many places today:

'There it stands! ' said Harlow, tragically extending his arm towards the house. ' There it stands! A job that if they'd only 'ave let us do it properly couldn't 'ave been done with the number of 'ands we've 'ad in less than four months! And there it is, finished, messed up, slobbered over and scamped, in nine weeks! ' 'Yes, and now we can all go to 'ell,' said Philpot gloomily."

The scamping of work—the tears trickling down the paintwork "as if the doors were weeping for the degenerate condition of the decorative arts"—the rushing and paint-slinging because "the job's losing money" (the unvarying condition of every building job, according to the boss) are well-known to every workman. If he has never actually worked for firms named Smeariton and Leavit, Makehast and Sloggit, Dauber and Botchit, Rushem and Pushem, he knows them very well; as well as he knows Crass the foreman, and the employer who "saw only that there was a Lot of Work Done, and his soul was filled with rapture as he reflected that the man who accomplished all this was paid only fivepence an hour."

Times may have changed, but not so very much, and what has changed not at all is the exploitation of the working class. That is why no book of its sort has had as much popularity with working men as the Philanthropists. It is wrong, however, to suppose that the exploitation has to go on. Jessie Pope altered The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and made its hero commit suicide—the act of the man without hope. Robert Noonan knew better. His manuscript ends not with suicide but with optimism:

"Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light . . .The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism."

Noonan had not really learned enough: his Socialism was the hopeful reformism of the Social-Democratic Federation. It would, however—in this writer's view, at any rate—be churlish to make that a major criticism. Here was a man who lived, suffered and was angry; would that there were many, many more.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has always been worth anybody's money, and in its full version it is even more so. Readers of the Socialist Standard who have noted the price and think it steep will be interested to know that there is a special "Trade Union and Labour Movement" edition in limp cloth for 10s. 6d., for which application may be made to the publishers.

Robert Barltrop

Caught in the Act: The Collapse of Trotsky’s Monument (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad news for Tariq Ali. Having with Redemption written an outrageously funny novel about the pretensions, delusions and follies of the Trotskyist Left in which he was once a prominent participant, he has been denounced as a renegade, a traitor, a bourgeois philistine, a despicable leper . . . only the Leninists know how to denounce like that. Having deployed his wit against the world Trotskyist movement, the crumbling Trotskyist monuments have responded with their dependable witlessness. The totally humour-free Socialist Workers' Review dismissed Ali's effort as "unfunny".

We suspect that Ali can cope with such devastating assaults. Impossible to cope with for him will be what is here: an article in the Socialist Standard praising him as a novelist and recommending this satire to all socialists who for years have laughed their heads off at the antics of the would-be vanguards on the Left. Old Leninists desert all kinds of silly prejudices as they discard their old dogmas, but few of them lose their dislike for those four commonly-spat initials, the SPGB. Bad luck. Tariq – everyone else thinks your novel stinks, but this writer loved every page of it.

Redemption is an almost relentlessly funny novel. What Malcolm Bradbury did to the trendy campus clowns in The History Man, Ali has done to the bar-room Bolsheviks of the Trotskyist left. The story concerns the aftermath of the east European uprisings of 1989 and the preparations for and holding of a congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International to formulate a new political position. The old Bolshevik formula is in worldwide disrepute: the proletariat have kicked out the dictatorship and the only believers left are the would-be dictators. These "leaders" are shown as pathetic, deluded, dishonest, unscrupulous and, not infrequently, insane men.

There are several easily identified caricatures of Trotskyist leaders. They are painfully accurate. Ali is ungenerous and spiteful towards these superstars of the sects, but they in real life are ungenerous and spiteful people whose opportunist tactics and contempt for working-class understanding makes them fair targets for Ali's poison pen. There is Frank Hood (the late Gerry Healy) who has young women from his party, the Hoodlums (WRP), sent to him for sex sessions. Another leading Hoodlum is Laura Shaw (Vanessa Redgrave) who drives to Trotskyist meetings in her chauffeur-driven Rolls and has Hood's body embalmed after he dies at the shock of a young female "comrade" discovering his artificial penis. There is Jed Burroughs (Ted Grant), the Shadow-Shadow Prime Minister and leader of the Burrowers (Militant Tendency) and Jimmy Rock (Tony Cliff), author of The Rockers Guide To Soviet Realities and leader of the Rockers (SWP).

The chapters on these latter two sects, which are both as detestable as each other, are the funniest pages in the book. Also captured with an accuracy which only a novel could capture so acutely (a pamphlet would be libellous, after all) are John Justice and his Satanist Tendency (the ultra-barmy Spartacist League in real life – real life?). Jemima Wilcox, editor of the "New Life Review" (New Left Review), Diablo (a parody of the ex-Trotskyist veteran Pablo) and Jim Noble, the archetypal fascist/Leninist leader of a party based on the American SWP called in the novel the Proletarian International Socialist Party of American Workers -PISPAW for short; get it? This was the section of the Fourth International that Ali used to be involved in.

LEFTWING SEXISM

Ali seems to think – and he should know because he has been closer to the Trotskyist leaders than most of us – that these people are motivated either by sexual disorders, whereby left-wing fantasising becomes a form of replacement for a humane sensuality, and/or egomania. These sound like cheap smears, and might have been intended so, but the analysis is not without insight We live in a society of perverse notions of success. Leninism, as a strategy for successful power-taking, is deeply authoritarian and is bound to attract those for whom the rhetoric of power (dictatorships, central committees, democratic centralism, smashing states, orders from above) is appealing. For such political personalities the power obsession becomes functional rather than instrumental. It should come as no surprise to materialists that the men who run power-hungry sects are created out of the ingredients which make up other authoritarian bosses who expect to have their egos massaged by their followers – and not only their egos.

Emma Carpenter, a disillusioned American Trotskyist in the novel, tells Jim Noble that the Trot sects are mirror images of Stalinism; Hood/Healy is referred to as an "inverted Stalinist". The capitalist system has screwed up a lot of people in its time, so what is odd about the fact that some of them try to screw up their unwitting political followers in a futile attempt to unscrew themselves? Maybe some of the characterisations are a touch crude in their depictions of the psycho-pathology of the fantasy lives of lefty leaders, but there is nothing far-fetched about the novel's description of they way in which so-called radicals have often treated women like dirt. (Let's fight for equality, but tonight, Me Dictator, You Proletarian). Left-wing sexism, an infantile disorder?

Redemption has some interesting things to say about the way that the Left treats women – one half of the species. The character of Maya, the young Brazilian beauty who is made pregnant by the seventy-year old Ezra Einstein, reminds us that while geriatric dogmatists play at revolutions in congress halls it is often women who are connected to those feeling of humanity without which there will never be any genuine socialism.

POLITICAL NUTCASES

Ah yes, socialism. This is where Ali has advanced no further than his days in the Trotskyist mad-house. Ali still believes that socialism came about in Russia in 1917. He applauds Leninism, but is embarrassed by the Leninists. On page one he writes of how popular wisdom had "consigned insurrections to the museum of Europe", but throughout his book he never touches on the root of the Trotskyist fallacy: the belief that by a vanguard-led insurrection working-class liberation, and therefore, socialism, can come about. In this he is at one with the political nutcases in his novel. He quotes Emma Carpenter's grandfather's Menshevik criticism of the Bolshevik adventure, but takes neither that critique nor any of his own a step further. He parodies Rock/Cliffs thesis that state capitalism came to Russia in the 1920s after years of Russia having been socialist, and rightly ridicules such unhistorical drivel, but what does he say about the serious state-capitalist analysis stated persistently since 1918 by the Socialist Party? Trotskyists have never liked to admit that they are simply Leninists who did not like Stalin's continuation of what Lenin began. This writer recalls challenging Ali to a debate several years ago on this very question. He replied that there was nothing that the wise Marxists of our party could possibly learn from him. No, that was not the point of the educational exercise.

The novel concludes with the congress of the Fourth International adopting a strategy from its master theoretician, Ezra Einstein (Ernest Mandel), to infiltrate the religions of the world. More could be gained from this than from boring within the left-reform parties, he believed: "Within ten years I predict we could have at least three or four cardinals, two ayatollahs, dozens of rabbis, and some of the smaller Churches like the Methodists in parts of Britain could be totally under our control. Our aim is to occupy the Vatican and elect a Pope from our movement". The PISPAW delegation responds with a resolution to form a new Trotskyist religion based upon the "dictatorship of the Angelariat". Very funny – nearly as hilarious as so-called Marxists telling workers to vote Labour at election time.

Steve Coleman

Literary lefties in the 1930s (1980)

From the May 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although the furore over Anthony Blunt has died down the question still remains: why did people like him swallow the "Russian Myth" so easily? We might ask this especially about other members of Blunt's generation and social background who were involved not in the visual arts but in the literary world. The pro-Communist sympathies of the literary left-wing did not amount to sustained and covert acts of treason but they allowed their ideology to govern their lives and work for the best part of a decade - and this did not stop at deception and the telling of lies.

In order to explain why these writers mistook Russian Nationalism for socialism it is necessary to appreciate the peculiarities of their approach to politics on the one hand, and the common characteristics of their background and culture on the other. First, who were the protagonists in this political tragedy and what was their contribution to the history and literature of the nineteen-thirties?

At the heart of the 'thirties literary movement, which comprised writers born during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was the Auden Group which emerged from the atmosphere and tradition of Bloomsbury. The group included the poets, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, along with the novelists, Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward who were attracted to the most promising poet of the period, Wystan Hugh Auden. Malcolm Muggeridge and Kingsley Martin also had strong connections with a definite intellectual tradition, that of the eminent Fabians. Muggeridge by virtue of his marriage to Beatrice Webb's niece, Kitty, and Martin through his position as Editor of the "Staggers and Naggers" - The New Statesman and Nation. Theoreticians such as the Labour politician John Strachey and the bright young Communist Christopher Caudwell contributed to the ideological justification of Communist politics in Britain; the former in his The Coming Struggle for Power and other theoretical works published by the Left Book Club of which he was a leading light, and the latter in Illusion and Reality, which attempted to apply Historical Materialism to the evolution of poetry. Claud Cockburn and the Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler were hard-headed Communists who, under the orders of their Russian masters, sent fabricated news-stories to England during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, Cockburn wrote under the slightly more proletarian name of Frank Pitcairn, while Koestler kept his membership of the Communist Party a complete secret while working as a reporter for the right-wing Hungarian paper Pester Lloyd. The two heretics of the literary left-wing were Julian Symons who became a Trotskyite during the 'thirties and George Orwell who viewed Stalin and Trotsky in the same critical light and described Russian Commissars as "half gangster, half gramophone".

The key to their left-wing sympathies can be detected in the official statistics of the period. It was a decade in which unemployment peaked at nearly three million in 1933; the Ministry of Agriculture revealed that 20 per cent of the nation's children were badly fed and Seebohm Rowntree claimed that 30 per cent of the city of York were living below the poverty line. The social conditions of the 'thirties are more poignantly illustrated in the following three extracts. Greenwood's piece from Love On The Dole was written by someone who was brought up in the conditions described; Orwell was fortunate enough to be a mere visitor to the industrial North; Day Lewis' poem could easily have been constructed by someone who had only read about such things in the press.

" . . . and to find the cost of this present system you only have to at our own lives and the lives of our parents. Labour never ending, constant struggles to pay the rent and to buy sufficient food and clothing. And the houses in which we are compelled to live are as though they have been designed by fiends in hell for our especial punishment. Even at best I say it is not a life." Love On The Dole by Walter Greenwood 

"She looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate hopeless expression I have ever seen." The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

"The hooters are blowing,

No need let them take;

When baby is hungry

'Tis best not to wake.

Thy mother is crying,

Thy dad's on the dole;

Two shillings a week is 

The price of a soul."

A Carol by C. Day Lewis.

The nineteen-thirties was the decade of social surveys and "Urban Rides" undertaken by a variety of writers, political activists and social scientists including Orwell, Rowntree, Wal Hannington, J. B. Priestley and Aronld Zweig, to name a few.

Running throughout the work of the literary left-wing - almost without exception - is a pervading sense of guilt which has three elements. The dominant of the three was the over-riding belief that they, born into the homes of small businessmen, shopkeepers and civil servants, educated at public school and in most cases Oxbridge, were, to use Upward's phrase, "Living off the backs of the workers". Somehow they were responsible for the worst features of the capitalist system. It was almost as if one particular phrase of Lenin's was taken to heart above all others.

"How could they be so blind as not to see that our enemy is the small capitalist, the small owner? In the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism our chief enemy is the small bourgeoisie, with its economic customs, habits and position."

The Chief Tasks of Our Times

Lenin, of course, was referring to Russia in an attempt to direct attention away from the bigger and more powerful capitalist institution - the State. here is an example of a political expedient in one country becoming a precept of political theology in another. This aspect of Communist propaganda implanted itself on the already guilt-stricken consciences of the literary intellectuals. For they had already inherited from their school days a sense of shame that they had been too young to test their manhood in the Great War. In addition their childhoods had been scarred by sexual and emotional trauma.

Upward described Repton School - unaffectionately referred to as "Reptile" - as being rotten with "a foul and vicious kind of sexuality" during his time there as a pupil. Orwell recounts the mental and physical cruelty of his Eastbourne prep school in Such, Such Were The Joys. Spender says that his parents might just as well have had him "educated at a brothel for flagellants" and Isherwood claims that his "middle class" upbringing denied affection and taught that sex was "the loathsome charnel house, the bottomless abyss and its natural outcome was paralysis". The political implication of these experiences is succinctly expressed by W. H. Auden:

"The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist State."

The lure of Russia, the call of the Popular Front and the fight against Fascism took on a new and personal perspective. The literary left-wing chose a number of ways to try to expiate their class-guilt (for example Orwell became a tramp), but most chose to join the Communist Party or become fellow travellers. This was far from an easy defection as they all experienced particular inhibitions in their dealings with the "working class". Muggeridge compares the fascination of the intellectuals with the workers to a small dog passing a big dog, half wanting to smell its bottom, and half afraid. It is worth commenting that their political needs were largely emotional rather than intellectual. They felt guilt but they did not "feel" Communism. It was an uncomfortable veneer which did not fit easily, and it required a great deal of their mental effort to convince them that it did.The contradictions inherent in Russian Communism were mentally accommodated but without realising that the paradoxes originated with Lenin not Marx. Therefore when they finally cast off the ill-fitting Communist mantle it was "human nature" that got the credit for the failure of this political exercise, and Marx who got the blame. This conventional conclusion is presented in Martin's autobiography under the heading of "Left Illusions" and in the infamous compilation by ex-Communists, The God That Failed. However their excuses are not historically accurate.

The anti-marxist foundations of Bolshevism have been highlighted in some detail by revolutionaries like Rosa Luxembourg and more recently by academics like Maximilian Rubel[1], Frederick Bender[2], and Paul Mattick[3]. Even raymond Willaims in Culture and Society and Robert Conquest in The Great Terror have been referred to the expedient innovations of Leninism. Yet it is precisely the flawed assumptions of the Bolsheviks which ensured the political betrayal and eventual disenchantment of individuals who could not stomach the rigours of power politics.

Lenin differed fundamentally from Marx, in his insistence that socialism could be established in a pre-industrial economy and that a socialist revolution could be initiated without the participation of the working class as a whole. These modifications required the redefining of socialism and the economic criteria of class so as to fit in with the economic conditions of Russia. It was this last alteration which enabled the Russian Communists to successfully dupe the literary intellectuals.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx declared:

"By the bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat the class of modern wage-labourers who having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power to live."

If they had read Marx the literary left-wing would have realised that they too were workers by virtue of their occupations as journalists and teachers. Their bourgeois "customs and habits" were not sufficient in themselves to constitute membership of the capitalist class. Like all other workers they stood as "non-owners" in relation to the social means of production.

Lenin insisted that the working class consisted only of industrial labor, a mere section of all wage-earners, and the party that represented their true interests did not consist of "the working class itself" but a minority of professional revolutionaries - Lenin's vanguard of the Proletariat. Lenin's contrived view of class gave rise to further inaccuracy and confusion in the writing of the literary left. In the work of the most promising young neo-Bolshevik, Christopher Caudwell, this revised view of class is taken to its most illogical extreme.

"All classes injured by the final explosion of capitalism - workers, peasants, small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, artists, specialists, technicians - compose that rebellious mass . . . but only one class is organised by its conditions of life to overthrow the old system and build a new."

Illusion and Reality

The literary left-wing believed for a time that capitalism would finally collapse and that their own involvement was of little importance in the face of the inevitable, but at least they were on the side of history.

It is ironic that contained in the speech that was to shape the political commitment of a whole generation of young artists was the admission that should have exposed Lenin's opportunism for what it was - not the way to socialism, but a road to disenchantment and despair.

"State capitalism would be a step forward for us."

The Chief Tasks of Our Times

 Richard Hales

Footnotes:

1. Pipes (Ed) Revolutionary Russia. 1968.
2. Bender F.L. The Betrayal Of Marx. 1975
3. Mattick P. Marx And Keynes. 1974