Posted 11:05 am by Ken

Orwell's other island

At the beginning of October I spent a week on Jura, courtesy of the Scottish Book Trust and Jura Single Malt Whisky. The Jura Lodge is easily the most wonderful house I've ever stayed in: imagine the holiday home of a wealthy family with improbably good, if eccentric, taste and a magpie's eye for Victoriana and natural history. At first I thought that's what it was. I was surprised to learn that it was all a recent fabrication, designed by a talented interior decorator. Lots of writers have stayed there under various versions of the scheme, and I'm grateful for my week. All I have to do in return is write a short SF story set on Jura, to be published exclusively on the company's website and (in hard-copy) in a collection in the Jura Hotel. I'm not even expected to say a good word for the whisky, though I will: Whyte & MacKay is one of my favourite blends, and the 16-year-old Jura single malt could quite aptly be labelled Revelation (alongside the Jura distillery's two other labelled expressions, Superstition and Prophecy) though it isn't.

I spent a lot of time outdoors, often getting thoroughly cold and wet, but I also had plenty of time and space to read and write. And naturally enough, in this cheery environment I thought about the gloomiest writer who ever stayed on Jura. I'd recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the SFX Book Club, and - in dark evenings and the odd torrential afternoon - on Jura I browsed through The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, as well as the informative locally-published booklet 'Orwell on Jura', and an essay on the same subject by Bernard Crick in a nice little collection, Spirit of Jura: Fiction, Essays, Poems from the Jura Lodge, copies of which are liberally scattered around the house.

There's a common misconception about Orwell on Jura: that he went there to die, and that in going there he more or less deliberately made sure that he would. This is usually accompanied by a mental image of Jura as a remote, cold, wet, wind-swept miserable place, more or less ideal for writing a grey dystopia and then pegging out. Not a bit of it! Jura's climate, though indeed wet and windy, is mild. Palm trees grow in front of the hotel. Lizards live in the drystone dykes. The island is only remote in the sense that it's a (breathtakingly scenic) trek to get there. It's less than a hundred miles west of Glasgow. As Bernard Crick put it, Orwell didn't go there to die, he went there to write.

Re-reading his essays brought me to a thought that rather surprised me:

If George Orwell hadn't written Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he'd be remembered as the author of a few depressing novels. Selections from his non-fiction would now and again be reprinted by AK or Pluto Press, with kindly introductions by Michael Foot or Tony Benn. The political right would have no interest in him at all.

He's always a pleasure to read, but as a political thinker he was neither original nor important. His criticisms of the left were sometimes unfair, but hardly unique. On the rare occasions when he put forward a positive programme of his own, or endorsed that of others, there's not a cigarette paper between him and the state socialists. Considered purely as a platform, 'The Lion and the Unicorn' shares a surprising number of planks with 'The British Road to Socialism' though to be fair the latter doesn't look forward to blood running in the gutters and red militias billeted in the Ritz.

Orwell's writings have an odd place in British culture. For many people, Orwell's essays and books are the only political writings from the 1930s and 40s they'll ever read. A fair bit of Orwell's political writing from that time consists of disparaging other political writing of the period - particularly the writing of the left. From 'Politics and the English Language' you can get the impression that such political writing consisted mostly of crass apologetics in dreadful prose. The result is that nobody bothers to read it, and Orwell's view reigns unchallenged.

'If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.'

I wish.

There's no necessary connection between political truth and verbal clarity. Let's take some writers whose politics Orwell would reject. Nothing could be stronger than Orwell's detestation of Fabianism and Stalinism. George Bernard Shaw stood for the first and more or less endorsed the second, yet The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism is a delight to read. Not all the Communists and fellow-travellers were hacks. (Orwell's citation of a rant from that quarter is tellingly under-referenced: 'Communist pamphlet' - I ask you!) T. A. Jackson and A. L. Morton wrote their best-known books in clear and vivid English. John Strachey was at his most lucid when he was at his most wrong. Professor J. B. S. Haldane's science essays are still read for pleasure. The Trotskyist C. L. R. James wrote one literary masterpiece; Trotsky himself was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull page, and in Max Eastman he found a translator worthy of his style. On the democratic, non-Marxist left, Lancelot Hogben, one of whose lazier paragraphs Orwell's famous essay holds up to scorn, was the author of Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen - he was no Isaac Asimov, I'll give you that, but mastering these two books can set you up for life (or university, at any rate) which is more than can be said for Asimov's Guide to Science, fine volume though that is. Hogben's two big books sold hundreds of thousands. His style can't have stood in many readers' way.

That's not to say Orwell didn't have a point. I've always relished this passage from Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism:

By contrast [with Marx's published work], the extreme difficulty of language characteristic of much of Western Marxism in the twentieth century was never controlled by the tension of a direct or active relationship to a proletarian audience. On the contrary, its very surplus above the necessary minimum quotient of verbal complexity was the sign of its divorce from any popular practice. The peculiar esotericism of Western Marxist theory was to assume manifold forms: in Lukacs, a cumbersome and abstruse diction, freighted with academicism; in Gramsci, a painful and cryptic fragmentation, imposed by prison; in Benjamin, a gnomic brevity and indirection; in Della Volpe, an impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference; in Sartre, a hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms; in Althusser, a sybilline rhetoric of elusion.

What can you say?

Well! - what you can say is that if you work your way through Anderson's egregious collocation of vocables (and yes, I have looked up 'egregious') every word of this makes sense, and for all I know may even be true.

Labels: amazing things, far left, Marxism, politics, writing

Posted 5:14 pm by Ken

If the second time was farce, what's the third time?

There's a certain kind of comedy that depends on the actors remaining deadly serious even as the audience is doubled up laughing. It restores one's faith in human nature to catch some of the actors smiling behind their hands. The only evidence of a sense of humour I've ever seen from Western Maoists was a reference (on Kasama, of which more later) to portrayals like this of their Five Great Teachers as '"history of shaving" pictures'.

Back in the 60s and 70s, many thousands of young Americans, radicalised by the Vietnam War and the Black struggle, were inspired by those socialist states that at the time militantly resisted the US: Vietnam, Cuba, China. They began to study what Ho, Fidel, Che, and Mao had to say, and thus found their way to Lenin and Stalin. They also re-examined the history of the CPUSA, which by then was for many young people a quite uninspiring organization, and found 'a usable past' in its early-30s militancy and its mid-30 to mid-40s popularity. The task was to do what the CPUSA had done in its glory days, but this time do it right.

And so the 'new communist movement' was born. Never was the adage 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce' more tragically and farcically apt. The strains of applying tactics drawn from the Stalinist line-changes of the past to the even more neck-wrenching lurches and swerves of 70s Maoism were more than enough to reduce the entire squabbling motorcade to roadside wreckage by the 80s. When you find yourself urging US imperialism to take a stronger stand against the Soviet threat, the suspicion must dawn on the dimmest that you're doing it wrong.

Some of the wheels that had dropped off kept trundling on. Some drivers kept walking forward with a steering-wheel clutched in their hands and encouraging imitations of engine noises from the passengers limping behind them.

Now these remnants are being joined by a small but growing crowd. One manifestation of that is Kasama, where posts and discussions are a random mix of sharp analysis, philosophical obscurantism, and Maoist baby-talk. Another is the recent rash of Maoist and Hoxhaist blogs. Despite being divided on whether China is now or has ever been socialist, they often link to each other, striving as of old to unite all who can be united against the main enemy: Trotskyism.

It would be interesting to know, from anyone better placed than I am, how much this reflects anything going on on the ground. Is the American radical left doomed to do the 60s and 70s over again?

We know how it ends, and it ain't pretty (Update: thanks to bensix in comments for the link.):



(This picture, which I think I found on Blood and Treasure is a lot more sinister than it looks. If anyone can remind me of the link, I'll be grateful. Update:, ah, found it.)

Labels: far left, Marxism, revolution, squibs

Posted 7:10 pm by Ken

When I were a lad, this were all fields

Over the past few days I've had a worse sense of insecurity and instability than I had after 9/11, and far more unsettling than I anything I felt when I was actually, ah, present at scenes of considerably more consequent rucks, not to mention rocks. Seeing Lewisham's clock tower on the telly had me thinking along the lines that when I was that age we knew what we were fighting for. There's probably a blue plaque there in our memory.

On Monday evening I watched The Grand Experiment, a documentary in a series on Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words - their words to, and on, the BBC: which institution, we are reminded, was a grand experiment in itself. I spent the rest of the evening and too much of the small hours watching BBC News 24 on the riots, the night Croydon burned.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks: you can see Tariq Ali calling for the abolition of money and the power of the soviets, and Milton Friedman calling for the ascendance of monetarism and the freedom of the markets, and in the middle some floundering mouthpiece of the consensus, such as poor old Lord Balogh marching into the lions' den of Chicago to defend the Labour Government.

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

I blame the parents, and the parents were us.

Labels: far left, history, libertarian, Marxism, politics

Posted 8:22 pm by Ken

That's MacLeod with an 'M', I think you'll find

On Saturday 12 March, 14:00 - 15:00, at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, I and Iain M. Banks will be talking about and possibly reading from our latest books, Iain's Surface Detail and my The Restoration Game, as part of Glasgow's literary festival Aye Write!.

A thoughtful review by Andy Sawyer of The Restoration Game is now up at Strange Horizons. And an enthusiastic review that I missed earlier appeared last September in the SWP's monthly journal Socialist Review.

One of the book's biggest strengths is its excellent characterisation of Lucy. Here we have a protagonist who is fully rounded, dealing not only with the enormity of the book's main plot but with the everyday pressures of work, friendships and relationships. All this is tied together in an enigmatic twist worthy of Philip K Dick.

The Restoration Game is highly recommended to fans of science fiction and political thrillers alike.

Labels: coming attractions, far left, local, self-promotion

Posted 2:38 pm by Ken

Lysenko's Tomb

A few months ago Chris Williams, an OU history lecturer and political activist whom I've known for years online, asked me to give this year's Darwin Memorial Lecture to the Leicester Secular Society. I suggested the topic of 'Darwin, Dawkins, and the Left' because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing.

The event, at the Society's splendid Victorian red-brick Secular Hall on 13 February 2011, drew a large and lively audience, from that cross-section of radical England that you so often find in its socialist, secularist and peace movements. Their searching and informed questions often had me thinking fast on my feet, and have improved the talk I actually gave into the version that follows. It's a combination of the talk I didn't give with the post I didn't write. I've left for another post what I said about my creationist upbringing and how I got over it.

The first questioner, after my talk, pointed out that all the examples I'd given of people on the left misunderstanding or misrepresenting Dawkins came from what the questioner called 'the ultra-left', mainly the Socialist Workers Party. It's a fair cop. In my defence, I said that the SWP is the largest Marxist organization in Britain; that Alex Callinicos is a respected academic, public intellectual, and prolific author; and that Richard Seymour's blog Lenin's Tomb is (quite rightly) one of the most widely-read and influential far-left blogs.

I also pointed out that the tropes I was talking about are found well beyond the SWP's orbit. A couple of years ago, a reviewer in the Scottish Sunday Herald ( 12 July 2009), wrote:

And science is no more immune to opinion, fashion and political bias than any other endeavour of humankind. (Evidence of that, I would suggest, is Dawkins's 1976 The Selfish Gene, ushering in the Thatcherite era. The clue is in the title.)

So while my examples were mostly from the far left rather than the broad left, I don't think they're thereby irrelevant.

However, in honour of my main foil in this over-long ramble, I've changed the title of the post from the one I used for the talk.

From 1972 - 1976 I studied biology and then zoology at Glasgow University, and read popular works about evolution - Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, Robert Ardrey's African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups and I think Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's The Imperial Animal. I soon found out that my teachers in biology and zoology didn't think much of these books, and that the message of most of these books was pretty conservative. They seemed to be saying, and quite often explicitly did say, that human nature was rooted in animal behaviour and was unchangeable. At the same time as I was learning about Darwin and evolution, I was learning about Marx and revolution. At that time, in the early and mid-1970s, there were very intense struggles going on in society, and an argument that was very much used by the conservative side in those struggles was precisely that the hopes of the left were futile and destructive because human behaviour was rooted in biology. This genetic determinism was quite prevalent and was linked to the argument that intelligence was genetically determined, and that the social inequalities between classes and races and sexes and nations were a straightforward consequence of differences in their genetic endowment. Workers and women and blacks and the Irish were just thick, and that was why they were what the left called oppressed, and that was that.

There were, of course, answers to these arguments from the left, some of them from distinguished psychologists and biologists, and I read them and listened to my lecturers who explained why the likes of Robert Ardrey weren't quite sound on evolution. This may help to explain but not excuse why, when I saw a copy of The Selfish Gene in the bookshop of Brunel University in 1976, I didn't read more than the title. I thought it was just more of the same.

Some time in the 1980s I read The Blind Watchmaker and was impressed enough to go and read the The Selfish Gene, and found that it was not at all what I'd thought.

The 'selfish' gene is, among other things, an explanation of how genes for 'unselfish' traits - traits that work against the individual organism's own reproductive fitness - can emerge and persist. It's because it doesn't matter to the gene's prevalence that its copy in one particular body is, let's say, eaten by a predator - as long as other copies of the same gene thereby get a better chance to be reproduced. To take a simple and familiar example, the 'gene for' the scut: the white underside of rabbits' tails. The white scut flashes like a warning light whenever a rabbit runs, and presumably makes the fleeing rabbit more visible to the fox. But it also makes copies of the same gene (or genes) in all the other rabbits more likely to get away.

The earlier 'group selectionists' explained this sort of thing - and there's lots of this sort of thing in biology - by arguing that behaviour or characteristics that benefited the group but not the individual were selected for because they helped the group survive. What the gene-selectionists showed mathematically was that this was unstable - that if selection took place at that level, genes that helped the individual to survive at the expense of the group (e.g. a rabbit without a white scut) would tend to spread through the population.

But over the years and right up to today, some people on the left still haven't read past the title. I remember some time in the early 1990s an article in Socialist Worker claimed that The Selfish Gene provided scientific cover for Thatcherism by saying that we were genetically programmed to be selfish.


A few years later, Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, took to task the materialist philospher Daniel Dennett for drawing on Dawkins's dangerous ideas. He wrote in the Summer 1996 issue of its journal, International Socialism

[Sociobiology's] ideological implications are made evident by the very title of one of sociobiology's founding texts, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976).

But this doesn't mean that Callinicos hadn't read past the title. He goes on to say:

Dawkins declares, 'We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.'

So he'd read at least the first page of the preface. The impression of progress, however, is at once dashed:

Human beings must thus be seen as essentially the bearers of their genes, who use them as means to maximise their reproductive chances. The reactionary uses to which this idea can be put were made clear in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's recent book The Bell Curve, which argues that black Americans' poverty can be explained by their biologically determined inferior intelligence as measured in IQ tests.

It should be emphasised that Dennett at no point shows any sign that he shares such repellent social views. [...] At the same time, however, the book is full of approving references to Dawkins' ideas and work [...]

See what he did there?

Reading this made my blood run cold.

In 2000, Julie Waterson, reviewing The Natural History of Rape wrote:

They want us to believe that theirs is a science book, using objective rules and laws. In fact it is a political book--similar to those used to justify capitalist greed (Dawkins' The Selfish Gene) and to condone racism (Murray's The Bell Curve).

A 2009 article and long comments thread on Lenin's Tomb, in which I participated, had a few highlights. In one comment, Seymour wrote:

Because Gould posits a much less reductionist model, much more pluralist in the way that selection works; and because he sees the struggle for survival as taking place at the level of the organism and not the 'selfish gene', he can argue that cooperation and mutual aid can be just as succesful pathways to reproduction as struggle and selfishness. Organs struggling against their environment can arguably do better by cooperation, depending on the organs in question and the environment in question. He doesn't have to explain altruism by reference to an altruism gene. For Dawkins, the sole unit of selection is the selfish gene, and the only route to reproductive success is selfish behaviour. The two views could not be more different. Dawkins offers a reductionist model that sees our morally laudable behaviour as a challenge or an affront to a natural order that is not just "non-moral" as Gould has it, but actually has immoral consequences by Dawkins' lights. Gould's conception allows for a great deal of flexibility, and Dawkins' doesn't.

I like the image of 'organs struggling against their environment'. I've had mornings like that. But seriously, this paragraph seems to get things entirely the wrong way round: if the unit of natural selection was the organism and not the gene, you would expect more selfish behaviour by individual organisms, not less!

In response to my hint that he might not have read the book, Richard responded:

It would be pathetic to rise to such baiting, and I considered it far better to just talk about the book in such a way that you might come away with the impression that perhaps you had pre-judged matters. So much for that. I certainly haven't read it 'cover to cover', but I've read enough of it to understand what it actually says.

I think that means 'No'.

The discussion sent me on a long and rather depressing trawl through other Marxist websites. In all fairness, some in the SWP have written reasonable and knowledgeable summaries of the debates in evolutionary theory. The most entertaining thing I found was a gem of an exchange on the website of one of the SWP's smaller competitors, where Clive Bradley trotted out all the usual pious objections, and Richard Dawkins quite unexpectedly responded, 'roasting [him] alive', as Bradley later acknowledged. It's well worth reading.

The more traditional Trotskyists Alan Woods and Ted Grant, in Reason in Revolt, their dialectical materialist guide to life, the universe, and everything, make heavy weather of Dawkins' metaphors:

According to Dawkins child adoption is against the instincts and interests of our "selfish genes." "In most cases we should probably regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of an in-built rule," says Dawkins. "This is because the generous female is doing her own genes no good by caring for the orphan. She is wasting time and energy which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly future children of her own. It is presumably a mistake which happens too seldom for natural selection to have ‘bothered’ to change the rule by making the maternal instinct more selective."

You'd never guess that Dawkins was writing about monkeys.

A likewise firm grasp of the wrong end of that very same stick was shown by Richard Seymour, in the thread I referenced earlier :

[Dawkins] tells you, for example, that natural selection favours lying, cheating, stealing children. He tells you that it favours a 'battle of the sexes'. He tells you that it favours competitive, selfish behaviour in such a way as to make, eg, the welfare state 'unnatural'. Now I am aware that he does not necessarily or wholly disapprove of the welfare state, and that he probably isn't a sexist or someone who looks unkindly upon children - but the point is that his inferences about human behaviour do have powerful ideological consequences even in the text's own terms.

Grant and Woods go on to raise the philosophical tone:

For Dawkins, human nature and motivation are to be understood by analysing human DNA. The same is true of James Watson (the discoverer, with Crick and Franklin, of the double helix) who said "What else is there but atoms?" They never allow the existence of either multiple levels of analysis or complex modes of determination. They ignore the essential relations between cells and the organism as a whole. This empirical method, which emerged with the scientific revolution at the birth of capitalism, was progressive in its day, but has now become a fetter on the advancement of science and the understanding of nature.

The fetter of the empirical method is certainly broken here.

And so on and on, right up to 2011, it goes:

I think it is well arguable that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins has always been inter-woven with a Thatcherite project of vicious, competitive individualism, egoistic bourgeois self-interest, and authoritarian national chauvinism, and now grounds an avowedly 'secularist' agenda which is a major vector for the revival of racism among middlebrow liberals who have already swallowed the neoliberal kool aid.

[...]

These people represent the basest elements, the ordure, of an imperialist culture whose degeneration is spiralling now that the crisis is eating away at even the perks and security of middle class employment. And there is further still to go. The adventures of the selfish gene have not ended at this nadir, I am sure.

To be fair, this outburst is in response to a remark by Dawkins in support of Pat Condell, an online comedian whose hostility to Islamism seems to have morphed into hostility to Muslims as such - but while Dawkins can well be criticised for that comment, it has no connection whatever with his advocacy of the gene-centred model of evolution.

What we see, over and over, is an apparent inability to grasp two simple points:

(i) that the selfish gene is not a gene for selfishness
(ii) that the gene-centred model of evolution is not about genetic determination or genetic determinism.

The perpetrators of this misapprehension also seem unaware that, as the radical anthropologist Chris Knight points out, the 'group selection' theory, which the 'selfish gene' theory displaced, was in fact the basis for the arguments advanced by some of the conservative popular biology works of the 1960s and 1970s - those of Ardrey, for example. These authors saw natural selection taking place at the level of societies, and argued that Western societies were losing out in the competition.

I suggest that part of the reason why geneticists and population-geneticists are not at all impressed by left-wing criticism - including criticism by left-wing scientists such as Gould, Rose, and Lewontin - is that several key figures in the development of these disciplines, notably J. B. S. Haldane and John Maynard Smith, were themselves on the left in 1940s and 1950s and had heard this kind of thing before. As Communists, Haldane and Maynard Smith had been severely burned by the Lysenko affair. In the Soviet Union at that time, mainstream genetics had been smeared as complicit in class privilege and racism. Lysenko wrote that all knowledge, including science, had a class basis. Not even Stalin fell for that. Looking over Lysenko's draft, Stalin scribbled in the margin: 'Ha-ha-ha! What about mathematics? And Darwinism?'

And it was indeed mathematics and Darwinism that buried Lysenkoism, as they also did for group selection.

The lesson, for a generation of left-wing scientists in Britain, was to regard dialectical materialism as irrelevant or dangerous to science. Decades later, the merest hint of it could still make their hackles rise. I well remember how one of them, the great entomologist and systematist R. A. Crowson, snapped 'That's irrelevant!' at me when I ventured a remark about speciation being an instance of 'quantity changing into quality'.

The lesson is unlikely to have been lost on the generation of geneticists and evolutionary theorists who were Haldane's and Maynard Smith's students. Nor was it lost on the 'mainstream' Communist parties. It may, however, have been lost on scientists from other disciplines (such as palaeontology, in the case of Gould and Lewontin, or neurology, in the case of Rose) which were spared the trauma, and whose encounter with Marxism was (as far as I know) mediated by the Maoist-influenced New Left of the 1960s. Still more has it been lost, it seems, on Trotskyism, which of course was innocent of the debacle.

In conclusion, I put it that the only kind of 'genetic determination' that Dawkins sees as possibly relevant to human social orders is 'kin selection and selection in favour of reciprocal altruism', which may have had powerful effects in the small, closely-related social groups of humanity's pre-history. And (as Chris Knight has also pointed out) if kin selection creates a biological basis for any human trait, it's fraternity.

So, brothers and sisters, why worry about it?

Labels: evolution, far left, genomics, Marxism

Posted 12:57 pm by Ken

Recent manifestations

On Sunday 13th February I gave a talk at the Leicester Secular Society's historic Secular Hall, on the persistent inability of some on the left to grasp what The Selfish Gene is actually saying. A full write-up is in the works but for the moment you can read the gist over at the Genomics Forum's blog.

Last week's LSE event on Science Fiction and International Orders was live-blogged by Stephanie Carvin. I've done a full write-up, which should appear in the next issue of the online magazine Salon Futura.

Labels: evolution, far left, genomics, Marxism, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 1:04 pm by Ken

This is not 1979 ... or 1989

Like many others I've been following the Egyptian Revolution in real time, flipping back and forth from Twitter (#Jan25 #Egypt #Tahrir are the hashtags to watch, and journalist Mona Eltahawy's tweets and retweets, along with the frontline reports (and amazing photos - and now live images!) of socialist journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, who also blogs here, are good ones to follow) to the Al Jazeera live coverage.

Just two comments for the moment. In yesterday's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes on Israeli official reactions to the revolution:

They recall that the Tehran crowds which won western hearts 31 years ago also looked secular and modern – only to be rapidly displaced by a dictatorship of the ayatollahs.

The Tehran crowds of 1979 did not look secular and modern - the streets were a sea of black chadors - and almost the only western hearts they won were those of people on the left who were assured by their Iranian comrades - godless and feminist to a man and woman - that what looked like a movement to put the ayatollahs in power was really something quite different underneath. This was true to an extent. But:

In the period leading up to the February insurrection, the left as an independent tendency within the mass movement did not exist. It simply merged with the Khomeini dominated movement, tail ending the reactionary leadership.

Juan Cole gives a very clear analysis of why nothing like that is happening in Egypt today, or is at all likely to.

So, not another 1979. 1989? Yes, in the sense that the revolution reverberating across North Africa and the Middle East is a geopolitical earthquake - with the difference that the regimes under threat are more repressive, and more far strategic for the Western powers than the East European regimes were for the USSR. And yesterday's and today's terrible events are a grim reminder that these dictatorships are, for a multitude of reasons, far tougher to crack than the bureaucratic socialist shells that collapsed under the weight of the crowds in 1989.

Labels: far left, Marxism, politics, revolution

Posted 7:40 pm by Ken

Jim Cannon's socialist hope

Speaking of optimism, here's the peroration of a speech that James P. Cannon, an American socialist, made in 1953.

All will be artists. All will be workers and students, builders and creators. All will be free and equal. Human solidarity will encircle the globe and conquer it and subordinate it to the uses of man.

That, my friends, is not an idle speculation. That is the realistic perspective of our great movement. We ourselves are not privileged to live in the socialist society of the future, which Jack London, in his far-reaching aspiration, called the Golden Future. It is our destiny, here and now, to live in the time of the decay and death agony of capitalism. It is our task to wade through the blood and filth of this outmoded, dying system. Our mission is to clear it away. That is our struggle, our law of life.

We cannot be citizens of the socialist future, except by anticipation. But it is precisely this anticipation, this vision of the future, that fits us for our role as soldiers of the revolution, soldiers of the liberation war of humanity. And that, I think, is the highest privilege today, the occupation most worthy of a civilised man. No matter whether we personally see the dawn of socialism or not, no matter what our personal fate may be, the cause for which we fight has social evolution on its side and is therefore invincible. It will conquer and bring all mankind a new day.

It is enough for us, I think, if we do our part to hasten on the day. That’s what we’re here for. That’s all the incentive we need. And the confidence that we are right and that our cause will prevail, is all the reward we need. That’s what the socialist poet, William Morris, had in mind, when he called us to

Join in the only battle
wherein no man can fail
for whoso fadeth and dieth
yet his deeds shall still prevail.

Cannon's deeds have prevailed all right. You may never have heard of him, but the world we live in would be noticeably different if Cannon had never lived, or had made different choices. Ignazio Silone once said that the final conflict would be between the communists and the ex-communists. One less-than-final but still significant conflict today, that over the left's response to war, is between those who work and think along the lines that Cannon laid down and those - the inheritors, whether they know it or not, of Shachtman on the one hand and of Stalinism on the other - who don't. Without Cannon, there wouldn't be an antiwar movement. There would be a 'peace' movement, begging the warmakers to see sense. There would be a 'Decent left', cheering the warmakers on. And that - give or take a few fringe intransigents - would be that.

How did Cannon acquire the confidence that the cause for which he fought had 'social evolution' on its side? As a youth he walked into a meeting to hear a lecture on 'Marx and Darwin'. That lecture, and further study, convinced him 'theoretically - and that is the firmest conviction there is' that capitalism is inseparable from crises and wars, that the great majority of working people would sooner or later be compelled to move into action against these crises and wars, and that they would establish as capitalism's successor system one of global co-operation for abundance, peace, and freedom. 'The victory of Socialist America is already written in the stars.'

Nothing that has happened since his death in 1974 would have surprised him if he'd lived to see it, or disillusioned him. He had no illusions. Cannon's theoretical conviction allowed him to face unflinchingly the terrible realities of the 20th Century: World War, the rise of Stalinism, the Depression, the Yezhovschina, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings, the Stalinist labour camps, the Cold War and the colonial wars. Unlike some, he faced and fought them all while they happened, in real time. He never gave an inch.

We're all so much more sophisticated now.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism, War on Terror

Posted 9:46 am by Ken

On Bloggingheads.tv with Annalee Newitz

On Thursday I did my very first webcam interview, for Bloggingheads.tv - I had to buy a webcam to do it. Now the world can see how tidy my workroom isn't. io9's Annalee Newitz and I talk about my books and about politics, Craig Ventner's synthetic organism, Scotland, The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game, near-future and far-future SF, and galactic princesses.

Labels: atheism, coming attractions, far left, libertarian, Scottish politics, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 2:52 pm by Ken

The famous Café Bristol

The Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, during which leading Soviet and Communist officials (among others) confessed to (among other things) plotting to murder Stalin, seize power, and restore capitalism, all with the direct aid of hostile foreign powers including Nazi Germany, were among the defining events of the Twentieth Century.

Anyone who has looked at the controversy over the Trials in any detail, if they know anything at all, knows this:

'Investigation of the few tangible “facts” alleged in the [first] trial proved fatal to the frame-up. For example, one of the defendants, Holtzman, testified that in November 1932 he had met [Trotsky's son] Sedov in the: “lounge” of the “Hotel Bristol” in Copenhagen and went with him to meet Trotsky and receive terrorist instructions. It was proved conclusively that Holtzman was not among the people who called on Trotsky and his wife, their friends and guards during the short time Trotsky visited Copenhagen to lecture in defense of the Soviet Union. Still more devastating, it was discovered that the Hotel Bristol had been torn down in 1917 and not rebuilt until 1936!'

Shortly after the non-existence of the Hotel Bristol in 1932 was established, the Stalinists countered as follows:

'Holtzman testified that when he arrived at the station he crossed over to the Bristol Hotel. Now opposite the station there is no Bristol Hotel. There is, however, the Grand Central Hotel, and in the same building there is a Bristol Café. Further, at the date mentioned, it was possible to obtain entrance to the hotel through the café. It may be that Holtzman, seeing the sign above the café, was confused as to the name of the hotel.'

(Soviet Policy and its Critics, J. R. Campbell, Left Book Club (Gollancz) 1939, page 264.)

To which Trotsky's defenders, in turn, countered thus:

Harking back to one of the mysteries of the first trial, the DW [Daily Worker] gave a sizable bit of its valuable space in the issue of February 26 [1937] to a plan of the Grand Hotel, Copenhagen, allegedly showing that one could enter a café said to be called the Café Bristol through this hotel – though how Holtzman could have proposed to ‘put up’ at this café still remained unexplained!

(Holtzman's exact words had been: 'I arranged with Sedov to be in Copenhagen within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol and meet him there. I went to the hotel straight from the station and in the lounge met Sedov.')

Furthermore, the only photograph of 'the famous Café Bristol' that the Stalinist press produced showed an establishment with the conspicuous sign 'KONDITORI BRISTOL' above its entire frontage, and with an entrance apparently several doors away from the nearby (also clearly signed) entrance to a hotel. Two witnesses to the Dewey Commission testified:

Directly next to the entrance to the hotel, and what appears as a big black splotch in the photo, is actually the location of the Café next to the Grand Hotel; and it is not the Konditori Bristol! The Konditori Bristol is not next door, but actually several doors away, at quite a distance from the hotel, and was not a part of it in any way, and there was no door connecting the Konditori (“candy store” it would be called here) and the Grand Hotel! Although there was such an entrance to the café which is blackened out in the photo, and which was not the Bristol.

In other words, between the Grand Hotel and the Konditori Bristol there was a café and between the hotel and the café there was an entrance, but there was no entrance at all connecting the hotel and the Bristol Konditori. B.J. Field and Esther Field were actually in that café and they were also in the hotel, so they are speaking from personal knowledge. They say further.

As a matter of fact, we bought some candy once at the Konditori Bristol, and we can state definitely that it had no vestibule, lobby, or lounge in common with the Grand Hotel or any hotel, and it could not have been mistaken for a hotel in any way, and entrance to the hotel could not be obtained through it.

And there, for nearly seventy years, the matter rested.

Then a Swedish-resident researcher, Sven-Eric Holmström, did what no one (it seems) had done in all those decades. He went to Copenhagen, where the very same Grand Hotel stands to this day, and investigated for himself. The result has now been published (PDF) by the American online Marxist journal Cultural Logic. I must admit that I would never have thought of tackling the problem the way he did. I would have assumed that any investigation at this late date would have to involve memoirs, or the testimonies of very old people - which would, of course, have left the question still open. I would have been wrong. Whatever one thinks of Holmström's wider argument in the article, he has settled the specific question of the connection between the Café Bristol and the hotel beyond a reasonable doubt, and in a way that does not rely on testimony. What it does rely on is so obvious that one can only wonder why no one thought of doing so before. It appears to be conclusive.

But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, chapter 7 (Penguin Modern Classics, 1970, p66)

Some readers may - as I did - have this same uncanny sensation when they look at the photographs in Figures 7 and 8 of Holmström's remarkable piece of historical sleuthing. They may also appreciate the grim irony, in this and its own context, of the above Orwell quote.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 3:58 pm by Ken

Socialism or your money back or your money back

The current issue of Socialist Standard has an interesting review page, including a slagging off of Red Planets (a book I haven't read but which has a chapter about my Fall Revolution books), and a (perhaps better deserved) slagging off of Žižek's latest caper.

Right at the bottom of the page is an ad for a book I can unhesitatingly recommend, Socialism or Your Money Back, a collection of articles from the Standard's first century (1904 - 2004). 'A running commentary on one hundred years of history, as it happened,' the ad says, and it's right. Every article in the book is consistent in outlook, reflects the time in which it was written, and yet (for the most part) remains readable and interesting today. You don't have to agree with the book to enjoy it, or to have your thoughts (and more) provoked. I bought it for a tenner when it came out, and it was worth every penny. It's now available in the UK for a quid, plus postage. As its publishers would be the first to agree, the market affects everything. You can get the entire collection of articles (but not the introduction and comments) free, but the book's a bargain even so.

(Why does the SPGB have annual conferences? So that it can react quickly to events.)

Labels: far left, Marxism, reviews, skiffy

Posted 9:54 am by Ken

Guilt-tripping and hair shirts not way to go, hair-shirted Green guilt-tripper admits

Mark Lynas, who recently welcomed recession and rising oil prices, and compared flying to planting mass-casualty long-delayed time-bombs, has had something of a change of heart:

If the lesson for scientists is that the era when they can practice their trade entirely separately from the rest of society is well and truly over, the lesson for environmentalists is equally harsh. Having spent years (once again, myself included) reminding the public of the horrifying potential consequences of climate change, and demanding major lifestyle change on the part of ordinary people, it seems that our message is not just falling on deaf ears – but may even be counterproductive.

We have to start accentuating the positive, rather than constantly invoking apocalypse. Getting off fossil fuels is a necessity, but that does not mean that people’s lives must be made harder or more austere. Forget all the “war economy” analogies, locally grown jam and appeals to save old clothes. Our message needs to be a forward-looking one of hope, prosperity and technological progress.

We also have to stop trying to make people feel guilty. No, flying isn’t analogous to child abuse. Polar bears won’t drop from the sky. Constantly accusing normal people of immoral behaviour is perhaps a way to get noticed, but not a clever way to win converts. And the normal people in question, upset at being accused of killing babies every time they step onto Ryanair, will be very susceptible to the first conspiracy theorist who whispers in their ear: “Don’t worry, it’s not true.”

Labels: climate, far left, genomics, libertarian, squibs

Posted 10:39 am by Ken

Chris Harman, 1942 - 2009

Chris Harman, who since the 1960s was a leading thinker and activist in the Socialist Workers Party (Britain), died on Friday. Although I didn't know him personally, his writings had a huge effect on my life, as they did on many thousands of others.

Condolences to all those who did know him, particularly his family and friends.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 3:39 pm by Ken

'I am Spart!', say a touching number of Tory bloggers

Leftwing blogger and author Dave Osler is facing a libel case over a blog comment. The implications for political blogging in the UK are considerable. Bloggers from left and right, including (I'm pleased to see) some of the more, ah, vehement stalwarts of the British right-libertarian/Tory blogosphere, are rallying round. 'Speaking on behalf of the political blogosphere, may I say that while you're clearly a terminally deluded lefty imbecile, you're our terminally deluded lefty imbecile,' says one. Further expressions of fraternal solidarity would be welcome.

Labels: far left, libertarian, writing

Posted 11:01 am by Ken

Cheerful thought

"Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes your knees."

- Rebecca Solnit, (left) quoted in an article in today's Guardian asking whether the left has missed the open goal offered by the current crisis. An earlier (1932) reflection on the same point has become something of a classic (pdf).

Labels: far left, Marxism, squibs

Posted 8:11 pm by Ken

The Prophet's Suitcase

Tim Wohlforth's memoir The Prophet's Children, which I found in the Oxfam bookshop on Byres Road, Glasgow a couple of weekends ago, is a dismaying and enlightening read for anyone who has ever taken Trotskyism seriously. And I have - it's creepily apt that the photograph facing page 157 almost has me in it.

Kids these days - heck, anyone under thirty - in Britain, France and a handful of other countries, probably think it's a small but normal part of the gaiety of nations to have Trotskyists running for President, sponsoring big talk-fests of leftwing politicians and trade unionists and public intellectuals, performing stand-up comedy, sitting on the executives of major unions, getting elected to the European Parliament, bringing about the fall of an Italian government, and so on and so forth, all the while upholding the charming old Trotskyist customs of selling newspapers, splitting and fusing and underestimating the peasantry.

It wasn't always like this. In the 1950s and 1960s even the largest Trotskyist organizations (apart from the one in Sri Lanka, which quite uniquely was the mass working-class party in the country, and one in Britain, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), which had about a thousand) had memberships in the hundreds, and the rest had tens at most. So the past few decades could be counted a success - 'the resurgence of the political formations associated with [Trotsky's] name', as a New Left Books back cover once pompously put it.

The man most responsible for that success, small as it was, being a lot smaller than it could have been was Gerry Healy, the very man who had built the SLL. Remarking on Healy's death in December 1989, the anarchist Nicolas Walter said to me that Healy was the most evil person ever to come out of the Marxist movement. What about Ceausescu (then in the news), I asked? I don't recall Walter's reply, by I do remember the impatient look and gesture that accompanied it. Britain's best-known anarchist wasn't given to cutting actual Communist tyrants any slack, but my guess is that he thought Ceausescu's character was better than Healy's. If so, he may have had a point. Say what you like about Ceausescu, he railed at his accusers, stood by his Elena, and died like a man.

Wohlforth, it's fair to say, doesn't use his memoir to shine a flattering light on himself. He adds little to the exposure of Healy, of whom enough and more than enough has been said. As early as 1959, one of Healy's biggest catches - Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist who'd covered the Hungarian uprising of 1956, found his reports spiked or distorted, and broken with the Communist Party as a result - gave a disturbing account of Healy's violence, lying and paranoia. Unfortunately it took another quarter of a century before the whole farrago imploded.

No, what's actually disillusioning is seeing the relatively decent characters in this long-running farce - Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Joseph Hansen, George Novack, even James P. Cannon (once described as 'a Healy who never found his Gadaffi') not to mention Wohlforth and his comrades and rivals, from James Robertson to Lyndon Larouche portrayed as little more than assiduous writers of internal documents that tried and failed to interpret a world being changed by others.

A perennial problem of Trotskyism has been trying to understand the post-WW2 social revolutions within the framework of Trotskyist theory. If you actually look at what actually happened, whether it's Czechoslovakia or Cuba or South Yemen, it's not at all hard to understand what was going on. Understanding it and making your understanding compatible with Trotskyist theory is an exercise in futility, like squaring the circle or getting a dent out of a ping-pong ball. I once made the effort, ploughing through: a whole load of the American SWP's and the Fourth International's internal documents reprinted decades later as 'Education for Socialists' bulletins; one of Wohlforth's tyro attempts; and a later document, 'The Theory of Structural Assimilation', which he authored on realising the first one didn't work. How depressing to see how Wohlforth himself had set about the task:

'That winter I took a suitcase full of old documents to a Miami Beach kosher hotel.' (p113)

It would be churlish to begrudge Wohlforth his second career.

Labels: far left, history, Marxism

Posted 3:14 pm by Ken

A Superfluous Science

But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, ch. 48

Superficially, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a gigantic reactionary mass movement to establish an Islamic theocracy. Likewise, a couple of years later in 1981, the insurgent Polish trade union Solidarity superficially appeared to be a Catholic, nationalist mass movement to overthrow the unpopular People's Republic and restore capitalism. And today, the Iranian uprising seems on the surface to a brave and massive, but minority, protest movement in favour of the neoliberal Islamist candidate who may (or may not) have lost the election and against the right-wing populist Islamist candidate who may (or may not) have stolen the election.

In all of these cases, and many more, Marxists have warned anyone who would listen that the superficial appearance shouldn't be mistaken for the essence, for what was really going on under the surface of events. The underlying essence varied, and varies, according to the Marxist but whatever it is, you can be damn sure it wasn't something you would have thought of yourself, or gathered from the biased reportage of the bourgeois press. Not many people would have looked at a photo of shipyard workers kneeling to take Mass and thought, 'What they're really after is socialism from below.' Not many people could hear millions of voices chanting 'Allahu akbar!' and think, 'Ah yes, the power of the people is greater than the man's technology.' Crowds hauling down statues of Lenin didn't look as if they were celebrating the spirit of 1917, but that just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be.

Wittgenstein: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I (Elizabeth Anscombe, a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein) replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well, he asked, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

Labels: far left, WoT

Posted 8:54 pm by Ken

An uprising that will stun the world

Early in 2001, the Iranian revolutionary communist Mansoor Hekmat said:

In Iran [...] the reality is that the rise of political Islam and religious rule has caused a staggering anti-Islamic backlash, in both ideological and personal spheres. The emergence of political Islam in Iran has become the prelude to an anti-Islamic and anti-religious cultural revolution in people's minds, particularly amongst the young generation, which will stun the world with an immense explosion and will proclaim of the practical end of political Islam in the whole of Middle East.

[...]

In my opinion, the Islamic movement in the Middle East and internationally will run out of breath with the fall of the Islamic regime in Iran. The question is not that Islamic Iran will be a defeated model, which others can disassociate themselves from. The Islamic Republic's defeat will arise within the context of an immense mass secularist uprising in Iran, which will touch the foundations of reactionary Islamic thought and not only discredit but condemn it in world opinion. The defeat of the Islamic regime will be comparable to the fall of Nazi Germany. No fascist can easily hold on to their position by merely distancing themselves organisationally and ideologically from this fallen pole. The entire movement will face decades of stagnation. The defeat of political Islam in Iran is an anti-Islamist victory, which will not end within the confines of Iran.

I don't know if he was right. But I hope he was.

Labels: far left, War on Terror

Posted 4:41 pm by Ken

As if you lived in the latter days of a smaller nation

It's been said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Things are very different in the Best Small Country in the World (TM). In Scotland history is a farce the first time around.

The Scottish Parliament has a system of proportional representation where the voters select one candidate from two lists. The constituency list is first-past-the post. The regional lists, covering wider areas, top up the representation according to some formula which needn't detain us. The system was used in two elections and worked fine. It wasn't broke. Someone decided to fix it.

Apart from replacing two lists on separate ballot papers with two lists on one paper, and presenting the voters with another ballot paper, using a new and different voting system, for a different election on the same day, and implementing a completely unnecessary and expensive electronic counting machinery which broke down repeatedly and spectacularly on the night, the geniuses who signed off the arrangements which resulted in a hundred thousand rejected votes ... never thought to user-test the new voting forms.

But enough squabbling amongst ourselves! Let's turn and face the real enemy, the Judean People's Front! Thanks to its divisions the far left has been wiped off the electoral map, going from six MSPs to nil. The Scottish Socialist Party was not only beaten handily by Solidarity - in five of the seven regions it won fewer votes than the Socialist Labour Party.

The what? Precisely. The Socialist Labour Party has next to no presence on the ground in Scotland (*). Socialist Labour got one election broadcast, fronted by the popular English actor Ricky Tomlinson, who emphasised that the party stood firmly against Scottish nationalism. Around a third of Scotland's far-left voters must have agreed.

* The Socialist Labour Party was founded by Arthur Scargill back in the 90s and was immediately joined by a plethora of far-left groups. Scargill cannily courted a succession of these groups, using each one that rose to the top of the stack to displace its precursor. After thus getting rid of the Trotskyist sects one by one he repeated the process with at least two sects of Stalinists, and then delivered the coup de grace to the last one standing. This single-minded application of salami tactics left him holding that twisty bit of cellophane at the end and not enough salami to cover a biscuit.

Labels: far left, Scottish politics